Presidential Leadership In The Americas Since Independence 149852656X, 9781498526562

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Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence

Presidential Leadership in the Americas since Independence Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2016 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-2656-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-2658-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-2657-9 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

ix

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Making Sense of Presidential Leadership Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics Leadership in the Wars of Independence and Their Aftermath Presidential Leadership and National Consolidation Presidential Leadership in the Era of State Development Presidential Leadership in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization Conclusion: The Transformational Presidents of the Americas

1 17 31 45 67 105 161 211

Appendix A

233

Appendix B

239

Bibliography

249

Index

261

About the Authors

271

v

Acknowledgments

No book is ever written and published without the help and support of others. Ted first had the idea for this project back in the summer of 2012 when he sent out an invitation for collaborators on the Brazilian Studies Association newsletter. Eventually Guy was invited to take a more active role in organizing and coordinating the offerings and looking for a publisher. Initially the project was going to focus on the Brazilian experience but over time it broadened into the comparative study of the Western Hemisphere that you have before you today. During the book’s long gestation, several individuals played important roles in its development. In 2014 Guy and Ted organized a panel on “Presidents, Protestors and Social Change” at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) congress in 2014 where João Paulo Peixoto and Paulo Roberto Almeida contributed by presenting papers and adding to the debate on presidentialism, after which the project moved away from having a specific focus on Brazil. At the 2015 LASA congress, Guy presented a summary of the findings from the book at the panel on “Leadership, Political Institutions and Parties” and is grateful for one suggestion in particular: namely, a historical survey of the “great” presidents where the suggestion of a survey was made—and which eventually morphed into the list of leaders cited, which is presented in chapter 3. Ted also presented some of the ideas in this book at a meeting of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, which proved helpful. We would like to extend a big thank you to Nicolette Amstutz at Lexington Books. She approached Guy about a different topic but was sufficiently interested in the idea of the manuscript to entertain a formal proposal. She believed enough in the project not only to offer a contract, but also to seek an additional review when Ted and Guy weren’t sure whether to continue with vii

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it. We therefore thank the independent (and at the time, anonymous) reviewer, Mariana Llanos, for her feedback, comments, and suggestions. Her contribution was invaluable and we feel that our responses to them have greatly improved the final product. Kasey Beduhn and Jimmy Hamill, also of Lexington Books, provided timely communications throughout. Guy would like to thank his former classmates from the LSE, Ignazio de Ferrari and Lila Caballero-Sosa, who took time out from their own work to read the chapters relating to Argentina, Peru and Mexico. Their comments and feedback were extremely helpful and ensured that our facts and dates were correct. He would also like to dedicate this book to his niece and nephew, Eva and Marshall.

Introduction

Two of the most important presidents of the Americas were George Washington and Simón Bolívar. Washington is revered as the father of his country, Bolívar as the father of five countries. Washington was a brave but mediocre general, far from the most brilliant of his contemporaries, chosen for leadership in part because of his firm commitment not to aspire to a lifetime in power. Bolívar was a brave and brilliant general and a writer of some interest. But, despite his republican principles, he believed his compatriots needed him in power for as long as he lived. He was a failure as a politician and was driven from his homeland in disgrace. He was the father of five countries only because the colonies he liberated were unable to stick together as he desperately wanted them to. How much does this difference in leadership matter? If Latin America had more heroes and fewer villains among its early presidents, how much better would things have been? Was Abraham Lincoln truly the secondgreatest American president, as many would argue, or might another leader have avoided civil war and freed the slaves nonviolently? Why did the Brazilians accomplish nonviolent abolition when the Americans could not? Were the many tragedies that mar the history of the Americas due to misjudgment and incompetence, or were the leaders faced with impossible situations? There is never a definitive answer to these hypothetical questions, and political scientists often prefer to stick to questions that can be addressed with statistical rigor. They examine the structures of government that are independent of the decisions made by any one leader. Valuable as these studies are for some purposes, they seldom help us think about the big questions that motivate interest in politics. People care very much about who their leaders are. They fight hard, sometimes in elections and sometimes in revoluix

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tions, to replace one leader with another because they think it matters. Nations everywhere put their leaders’ images on coins and currency, erect monuments to them and dedicate holidays to them because they believe they deserve credit for their accomplishments. Historians have given more attention than social scientists to the role of leaders. They study and teach history on the assumption that we can learn from it. Does the fact that George Washington was the “founding father” of the United States help to explain why it became a much wealthier and more powerful country than the republics led by Simón Bolívar, José de San Martín and Antonio López de Santa Anna? Historians have published a treasure trove of information about these leaders and their times, but they sometimes hesitate to venture answers to the broader questions raised by social scientists. Our goal is to use this historical information to address some more general questions that are more often raised by political scientists and sociologists. A good deal of scholarship, both in history and political science, has focused on the presidents of the United States. And that makes sense, since the presidency of the United States is arguably the most powerful leadership position in the world. But one leadership role in one country is a small sample upon which to base general conclusions about the role of presidential leadership. To the south of the United States, in Latin America, are around 20 (depending on how you define Latin America) republics which gained independence soon after it was won in the north. These countries have over 200 years of independent history, including struggling against their colonial masters, consolidating as nation-states and responding to the growing demands of their people. Throughout that time political leaders—especially presidents— have played a central role, but the systematic study of presidentialism is just beginning in Latin America (Peixoto 2015, Neto 2016). In this book, we contrast and compare the role of presidential leadership in seven of those countries—Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Chile—with that in the United States. The United States constitution was designed to create leadership that would be just strong enough but not too strong. It was to be constrained by the legislative and judicial branches and subject to regular elections. Did this structure matter, or did it work only because of the quality of its leaders? Many early leaders in Latin America were impressed by the success of the United States and also adopted constitutions with presidential leadership and a separation of powers. Of course, each country’s system differs, and the Latin American countries have changed their constitutions over the years much more than the United States has. But the republics of the Americas do offer a number of very interesting cases for comparative analysis.

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Several decades ago, a number of scholars (including Schlesinger, Maranell, Neal, Murray and Blessing; see Nelson 1996) compiled lists of the “greatest” presidents in United States history. Their first efforts relied on the judgments of historians and political scientists; later efforts used statistical indicators. While these studies generated some interesting ideas, it became clear that the “greatness” of a political leader was only partly a function of his or her personal traits or skills. It also depended greatly on whether the historical circumstances were ripe for a major shift in the political climate. There are times when a country seems to be at a “crossroads” or a “turning point” or “in crisis” and a leader may have a decisive impact. There are other times when a leader who wants to make changes seems to be “banging his head against a stone wall,” or in Simón Bolivar’s metaphor, “ploughing the sea.” Of course, these complaints might just be an excuse for failure; there is always the possibility that a different leader might have succeeded when one felt stymied. Historical perspective can help us to reach betterinformed conclusions about a given situation, although even with decades of perspective historians do not always agree. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP Social scientists have invented a variety of concepts intended to describe different kinds of leaders. Perhaps the most widely used set of concepts has been German sociologist Max Weber’s (1919) typology based on how leaders win legitimacy. Charismatic leaders have a personal “gift of grace,” their authority coming from their personal magnetism. Rational-legal leaders get their legitimacy from following legal obligations, often as embodied in formal constitutional law. Traditional leaders inherit their legitimacy from further back in the past, from what Weber called the “eternal yesterday.” Weber’s typology can help us to understand cycles of political change. A new cycle may begin with inspiration from a charismatic leader, whose personal strength and vision gives people hope and the confidence to accept change. The rational-legal leaders then get their legitimacy from following the precedents laid down by the charismatic founder as elaborated in laws and constitutions. As time passes, new ways of doing things become traditions and leaders coast on the inheritance from the past, until such time as the contradictions of the system become more acute or a new generation tires of the ways of the past and a new charismatic leader emerges. Being charismatic seems to be a fixed personality trait; some leaders just don’t have much charisma no matter how much they would like to. Other roles can be learned. One can learn to be a rational-legal leader by taking courses in public administration and learning tools to fix problems. But no matter how charismatic a leader’s personality, or how well honed his or her

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rational-legal skills, the society has to be ready for the kind of leadership that is being offered. An outstanding president has to be in the right place at the right time and have the skills and initiative to make the most of it. Presidential scholar Erwin Hargrove (1998, vii) puts it well: To be successful, a president must use skills and embrace goals that are congruent with the historical context. The preeminent skill is discernment of the political possibilities of a given time. Of particular importance is insight into the resources for and constraints on action in the political culture.

Two political scientists have been particularly helpful in explaining how leaders fit into a changing historical context: James MacGregor Burns (1978) and Stephen Skowronek (1993, 2009, 2011). Burns contrasted transformational leaders, who triggered major change by mobilizing the aspirations of the people, with transactional leaders, who worked within a system, balancing the interests of competing groups. There is an element of circularity in this definition in that we know a leader was transformational only after the fact. In our cases, we find a great many leaders who wanted to be transformational and failed. There are also leaders whose focus seemed to be mostly transactional, but who ended up bringing about lasting change. Stephen Skowronek developed a typology of presidential leadership that helps to explain how presidential leaders interact with historical change. Terry Moe (2009), surveying the state of American presidential studies, observed that although “Skowronek’s work on the presidency is something of an exception,” it is “an analytical stroke of brilliance.” It has stimulated a line of research which addresses critical problems that have not been productively analyzed with the quantitative methods that have loomed prominently in American presidential scholarship. In his very intensive study of the United States presidency over historical time, Skowronek found that there was a cycle of what he called political regimes. These regimes are constellations of ideological and political forces that emerge, dominate political life for several decades, and then decline. The role that presidents play depends on how they fit into this cycle. In Skowronek’s typology there are four kinds of presidents. Reconstructive presidents are those who establish a new regime, defined as a constellation of social and political forces that lasts for a significant period of time. He calls them “reconstructive” rather than just “constructive” because they usually claim to be reconstructing values from the past. But in fact, most of them constructed quite new systems. Burns would call the same individuals transformational presidents. Skowronek’s next three types are all variations of the leadership roles Burns lumps together as transactional. Skowronek’s second type, articulative presidents, reinforce and help to entrench a regime that has been established

Introduction

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by a preceding reconstructive president. A perhaps better term for this group, consolidating, was introduced by Hargrove (1998). Transformational and consolidating presidents both swim with the tide of history. Consolidating presidents may not be heralded as “great,” but their role is absolutely necessary to the progress of the system. Skowronek’s two remaining types swim against the historical tide. Preemptive presidents block a strong regime as best they can. Disjunctive presidents defend and shore up a declining regime for as long as they can. These are very difficult roles to play well, and even the most successful leaders who find themselves in this situation may not be much appreciated for their legacy. But Hargrove (1998, 61–67) points out that preemptive presidents who seem stymied by the climate of their times may play a preparative role by raising new ideas and creating the infrastructure for changes that will only be realized by a future leader. Skowronek’s work has been central to what is known as the historical institutionalist method in political science, an approach that uses case studies to analyze large-scale social change. Several scholars (see Dickinson 2009, Jacobs 2009) have noted the importance of Skowronek’s work in breaking out of the limitations imposed by the quantitative approach that has loomed prominently in American presidential scholarship. Sophisticated quantitative methods require a great deal of high-quality data, something which is lacking for many of the countries and historical periods we study in this book. In many of the countries, the decades following independence were times of chaos and caudillos, making the collection and archiving of reliable public records difficult. Even for later periods, the data that are available are often not consistent from country to country or from historical period to historical period. But limiting research to periods for which good quantitative data are available would mean missing the events that made the countries what they are today. One alternative is to study each country and historical period as a unique, idiosyncratic entity. This is the approach taken by many historians, and their work provides the data for our study. The historical institutional method, as exemplified by the work of Skowronek and others, provides a conceptual framework for comparing different countries and epochs. It allows us to begin drawing some tentative generalizations about how presidents and other leaders function within the parameters of constitutional republics and the constraints of historical epochs. We have been especially interested in the options that presidents have had in different historical conditions, in the choices which they have made, and in the consequences of their choices. This has enabled us to reach some conclusions about what allowed some presidents to be transformational, as Burns defines it, and what caused some to miss historic opportunities. To do this, we have used the model of political time with historical discretion, rather than trying to shoehorn history into a

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predetermined model. Some of the political regimes we examine have been quite short, others have perhaps lasted much too long. But we have found enough regularity to permit some interesting and perhaps useful generalizations. WHY COMPARE THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA? One of the challenges of the historical institutionalist approach is selecting cases for analysis. Comparing United States presidents over historical periods of time was a very productive choice for Stephen Skowronek and other scholars. We believe that the time is now ripe to extend scope of that analysis by comparing United States and Latin American presidents, for several reasons. First, limiting one’s scope to one country presents problems for political science, which seeks generalization to inform and develop theory (Edinger 1990). Indeed, Bell (2009) notes that even though the study of leadership has become much more systematic since the 1960s, the extent to which it has been theorized sufficiently has been limited owing to the tension at work between the focus on the particular and local on one side and the difficulty of translating this into more generalizable and universal accounts. In response to this, a broader analysis of leadership is needed, and a comparative study of many leaders can offer insight into the common patterns and differences which individual cases cannot provide (Wiatr 1988). Second, a comparative study can provide insights into the origin, form and impact of leaders’ power, including the legal or constitutional grounds on which they hold power, the political environment in which they operate, and their ideological orientation (Blondel 1987). Political systems have been quite different in each of the eight nations examined in detail here, and they have also varied sharply over time within each country, so there is a rich body of material for comparative study. Comparing leaders both across time and between countries can provide important accounts of both leaders and their political systems (Wiatr 1988). Because change has been so important in the countries examined here, we place special emphasis on examining changes over historical periods of time, rather than a cross-sectional approach comparing systems at one point in time. A cross-sectional approach would give very different results at different times in history. We sought to control for the variation caused by different constitutional systems by focusing on presidential leadership in countries with a division of power between president, legislature and judiciary. But we recognize that political regimes can change even while maintaining the outward constitutional appearance associated with presidential government; therefore, we have incorporated the concept of political time, recognizing that the underlying social and economic forces that support the political system often change

Introduction

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from one historical period to another. For this work the qualitative descriptive work of the historians has proved invaluable. Third, the study of different leaders can tell us a great deal about the psychology of political elites (Wiatr 1988). While the person of the president remains important, his or her ability to act is constrained by institutional arrangements (e.g., the constitutional rules, separation of powers) and the political actors (e.g., politicians, judges, interest groups, bureaucrats) who established those institutions. By studying presidents across different political time periods, we have been able to make observations not only about the nature of the presidents who occupy the executive offices but also about the wider political elites which occupy the other institutions in the political system. This offers an historical account of political elites, their assumptions and expectations, and how they vary over time and in response to emerging social, economic and political developments. Fourth, a comparative study of presidential leadership in the United States and Latin America can encourage a more integrated approach to the field. While there is some overlap in the field of presidential research in the two regions, especially an interest in the interaction between the individual (i.e., the president) and the situational (i.e., the wider political system, social and economic configurations), there are also important differences in research traditions between scholars of the United States and Latin Americanists. By pursuing a comparative approach, the strengths of both of these traditions can help to place our theoretical generalizations on a firmer empirical base. Our analysis is broad in its historical scope because the most important impacts of leadership are long lasting, and because it takes historical perspective to judge them. It shifts away from a focus on the relatively recent past, especially the democratic period of the last 30 years in Latin America. This comparative approach is applied to the historical record of independent American states since independence. An advantage of this approach is that it includes examples of both forms of comparative analysis, i.e., “most similar” and “most different.” In terms of the “most different,” it introduces a wide range of political contexts into the proceedings—military regimes, civilianled republics, the contrast between relatively constant constitutional order in the United States and greater constitutional instability in the Latin American republics; these are “flattened” out through another aspect of the comparative method: the “most similar” feature, in this instance through a constant unit of analysis, that of presidential leadership. To generalize over long periods of time, we have limited the use of concepts whose meaning varies greatly from one historical period to another. An example is the concept of populism, which has been used to refer to a wide variety of quite different movements, including authoritarian leaders in the 1930s, civilian and democratic politicians pursuing neoliberal reform in the 1980s, and left-wing critics of neoliberalism in the 2000s. 1 By focusing

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on presidential leadership instead of on more historically specific concepts such as populism, we have sought to achieve some degree of consistency in analyzing the different American countries in different historical periods. Although presidential leadership is a distinct form of executive government and provides much of the basis for our subsequent analysis, historical reality has required us to include two non-presidential cases: monarchical rule in Brazil and (to a lesser extent) Mexico during the nineteenth century. These two may be deemed broadly similar to the presidential experience in that both emperors exercised real power, including the ability to make and break governments and initiate and implement policy. In that sense both operated as chief executives similar to their presidential counterparts. In this regard they were more similar to today’s monarchies in the Gulf States and less like the constitutional monarchies that serve as figureheads in Europe. The presidential system in Latin America had many similarities to that in the United States. Following independence, the aim was to replace a European monarchy (Britain in the case of the United States, Spain in the case of Spanish-speaking America; Portuguese-speaking Brazil constitutes a separate case) with a strong executive. At the same time, there was a need to contain the executive, so as to prevent the arbitrary (ab)use of power (Mezey 2013, 54). While the elites in many of the new Latin American states followed the example of the United States (which had gained independence a few decades earlier) by adopting a presidential system, they did not do so mechanistically. The framers of the US constitution sought to establish a clear separation of powers between the executive, legislature and judiciary, with checks and balances by each institution on the other. Meanwhile, in Latin America the introduction of presidentialism in the nineteenth century made use of the French 1791 constitution, the 1812 Spanish constitution, the 1814 Norwegian constitution and the 1822 Portuguese constitution, all of which promoted a subordinated position for the executive (Ginsburg et al. 2010). POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AND PERIODS OF CHANGE While it is possible to write biographies of transformative leaders as individuals, even these biographical works must place them in their historical and social context. Their contributions are not individual, as those of a scientist or artist may be. They must be judged by their use of the resources available to them at their juncture in historical time. The presidents of the early postindependence period had small staff and resources, in contrast to those in subsequent centuries. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would not have had the ability to implement the kind of measures that Franklin Delano Roosevelt did, for example, even if they had wanted to. As new republics

Introduction

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founded in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the nations we are studying were part of the same global economic, political and cultural epochs. We have structured our analysis to fit these historical periods. History is progressive and the nations of America have made great economic, cultural and political progress since independence. But progress is not continuous, and historians have often noted that it goes through periods of relative stability broken by sharp and often unexpected changes. Harry Eckstein (1992, 233) has said that analysts can choose: “whether [we are] to think of the flow of history: whether to treat history annalistically, as a continuous thread, or as passing through distinct phases.” In our analysis, we have followed Skowronek in focusing on the phase transitions rather than on the continuities. It required some effort for Skowronek to detect some of these transitions in US history. But in Latin American history they have often been glaringly obvious, and Skowronek’s concept of the political regime applies even better there than it did in his work on the US presidency. Yet this has not been the predominant approach in political science. Weisberg (1982, 9) has pointed out that much of the work in the discipline has emphasized the explanation of stability rather than change. Eckstein (1992, 188–91) has suggested that the stability of government types or regimes owes much to the congruence of authority between political institutions such as political parties and non-political institutions such as the military, economic interests, labor unions and the family. But while these power structures often seem implacable, they do break down and change does happen. Sometimes it is brought about by new social forces that challenge the base of an existing regime, weakening it and eventually leading to its decline and collapse before starting over again with a new model. But not all important changes are caused by groups that intentionally seek change. Change can also come from the pursuit of greater efficiency and effectiveness within the confines of a system (Eckstein 1992, 257–8), transactional changes that provide both the need for transformational changes and the resources to make it possible. This is shown in Marx’s analysis of social and economic change in the transition from feudalism to early capitalism and subsequent industrialization: in each stage of development, the political system represented those with power, but as the economic system changed and new groups emerged, power shifted from the established forces to the new ones—who demanded their right to be represented in the political system. These social forces can cause distinct changes in the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, from one historical era to another, even before a change in political forms. Looking back at history, these changes may seem to have been inevitable. But the countries examined here made these changes in very different ways, and much of that difference can be attributed to the actions of their leaders, especially of their presidents. At least, that is the argument that we make in the chapters that follow.

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CHAPTER TOPICS This book is structured in the following manner. Chapter 1 looks more closely at the political science literature on presidential leadership, and more generally at the field which has become known as “leadership studies.” This chapter will be of most interest to students and professionals in these disciplines who want to place our work in context. Those who are more interested in the historical material will be more interested in chapter 2. This chapter offers a statistical approach identifying the most important political leaders in the Americas, based on a tally of citations in history textbooks. The quantitative tally includes leaders from all of Latin America and from the United States, even though we have not been able to treat all of the countries in our qualitative chapters. Chapter 3 summarizes our application of the concept of “political time” as set out in this introduction to the histories of eight American countries since independence: the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and Chile. This isn’t all of America, but it includes the bulk of the population and certainly offers enough variation to challenge our analytical framework. All of these countries have had a presidential system, with a division of powers, for at least a substantial part of their history. And it is important that we consider a long historical time since changes in generations and political regimes are long-term phenomena. We divide this history into four historical eras: (1) independence and its aftermath, during which time a political order was established which reflected the interests of a narrow economic and political elite, largely based on land ownership; (2) a period of national consolidation when national identity became more concrete, even though political power remained in the hands of a relatively limited elite based on property and commercial interests; (3) a time of state development in which the previous political regime was challenged by new and emerging social and economic forces and organizations, including labor; and (4) neoliberal globalization and its aftermath, when democracy has become broadly established across the hemisphere and structural adjustment has taken place. We devote a chapter to each of the historical eras, discussing the political regimes in each country in turn. The historical eras are shaped largely by global economic and social factors that are beyond the control of any president, and they are the same for all of the countries. The political regimes reflect the political solutions that the leaders in each country found to the common problems, and they are quite varied. They average about one generation in length, but there is considerable variation. In the final chapter, we synthesize our results, draw general conclusions and offer suggestions for the future. We identify those presidents who, since independence in the Americas, we consider merit the label “transformation-

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al.” Of course, history cannot be reduced to general formulas and the future will present many surprises. But we believe that this research can give a more informed understanding to presidential leadership in the Americas and serve as a first effort towards a more comparative examination of the subject across the 200 years of independence in the region. NOTE 1. See, for example, our observations on “serial neo-populism” in Peru in the neoliberal globalization chapter.

Chapter One

Making Sense of Presidential Leadership

Journalists and politically interested citizens pay a lot of attention to presidential campaigns and sometimes spend a good deal of time and money trying to influence the outcomes. When cynics object that presidential elections don’t really matter, they point to examples such as the contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000. If Gore’s supporters had been allowed to finish the Florida recount, and he had won in the Electoral College, it seems highly likely that the United States would not have invaded Iraq in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks. This would have had important consequences for the world as a whole. Historians often write about episodes such as this, but political scientists are more inclined to minimize the importance of individual presidents (Mezey 2013, Bell 2009). If they study the presidency as an institution, they focus on administrative and bureaucratic processes that continue from one administration to another. This is understandable; it is easier to build theoretical models and do statistical tests on a stable system. This is not a matter of political ideology, it is a professional bias that applies to both the left and the right as they attempt to build scientific theories of politics. Both emphasize enduring structures, not the ephemeral decisions of leaders. Marxist social scientists emphasize class struggle, economic power, and racial oppression while liberals emphasize the plurality of interest groups, legislatures, bureaucracies and the judiciary. But both tend to focus on long-lasting structural forces in their quest to build lasting theoretical generalizations. These theories have value; they describe how the system works during periods of stability. But they often break down during periods of crisis and change. For a classic example, Karl Marx expected socialist revolution in the 1

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Chapter 1

Europe of his time and welcomed the wave of revolutions that broke out in 1848. But the outcome was not what he expected. Power was won with strong public support, especially from the rural population, by a man Marx thought to be a grotesque mediocrity. Bonaparte set up an authoritarian dictatorship of the right. Marx raged that “a nation, no more than a woman, is not excused for the unguarded hour when the first adventurer who comes along can do violence to her . . . there remains to be explained how a nation of thirty-six millions can be surprised by three swindlers, and taken to prison without resistance” (Marx 1913, 16). For a more recent example, Brazil weathered the 2008 global economic crisis very well, and several political scientists wrote books about how well the political system was working (Melo and Pereira 2013, Monteiro 2014). These political scientists were well informed and their work was grounded in careful analysis; it was a useful description of a historical period. But the books were poorly timed; by the time they came out, the Brazilian economic and political system had gone into a severe crisis. The crisis was partly due to economic factors out of Brazil’s control, but seriously exacerbated by serious leadership errors by President Dilma Rousseff, which are discussed in chapter 7 of this book. There are two reasons why social scientists often overemphasize continuity and fail to anticipate critical changes. One is not giving enough emphasis to the cyclical nature of social life. We review the cycles of political change in the Americas in the next chapter. The other weakness in the social science literature is too great an emphasis on structural or cultural determinism, minimizing the ability of leaders to steer their countries in one direction or another. As Blondel (1987, 3) observes, political leaders occupy an asymmetrical position in the political system which often gives them the power to impose their preferences and wishes on others. Two movements in the social sciences have grown up to address this issue. The first is the new discipline of leadership studies (Perruci and McManus 2013). This has become a discipline of its own with its own journals and conferences. Leadership studies is very much international in scope, looking at leaders in a very wide variety of countries and historical periods as well as across different fields, including the business sector as much as the political. The second new discipline is that of presidential studies, which initially developed in the United States and until recently had limited regard to other countries. This new discipline also has its own conferences and journals and it offers insights that we can apply to Latin America. This chapter summarizes the key ideas we have drawn from the fields of leadership studies and presidential studies which are relevant to our cases.

Making Sense of Presidential Leadership

3

HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE AND MEASURE PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP? What is leadership? How can it be identified and evaluated? While many leadership skills may be generally applicable, we are focusing our discussion on political leadership and on a specific variant, that of leadership in presidential systems, or presidential leadership. Political leadership has been studied most centrally by political scientists and historians, with important contributions from psychology, sociology and other disciplines. Many of these scholars have banded together in the interdisciplinary field of leadership studies, which includes corporate and organizational leadership as well as political. Our approach draws most centrally on the work of historians and political scientists. But, there can be a tension between these two disciplines. With a focus on the macro-level, political science seeks to provide generalized accounts and theories about how the world works. These theories aspire to explain events in different times and places. By contrast history is more concerned with the particular, that is, with specific cases which are not replicable. But while the disciplinary philosophies differ, both study the same leaders in the same countries, and we believe that both disciplines can be strengthened by bringing the two together. Roger Gill (2011, 1) has suggested that uncertainty about the importance of political leadership may be partly due to a lack of agreement as to exactly what is meant by the concept of “leadership.” Often, scholars find it easier to agree about what actually happened in various countries, than about the concepts used to describe it. As a suggestion for reaching conceptual agreement, Gill defines leadership as “showing the way and helping or inducing others to pursue it.” This is similar to the definition provided by Peter Northouse (2010, 3), who describes it as “a process whereby an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.” One way to study this is to focus on the life histories of individual leaders, those who have often been called the “great men” of history (Edinger 1990). The focus of the early biographies of “great men” by writers such as Plutarch and Augustine emphasized their moral attributes, whether they were virtuous and therefore legitimate. But Machiavelli concerned himself less with virtue and more with effectiveness while Thomas Carlyle focused on the “heroic” qualities of these individuals (Wiatr 1988). Yet even if scholarly focus on the lives of “great men” has become less fashionable, it remains an important approach that has continued alongside the development of other methods of leadership study. This is notable in the ongoing publication—and public acceptance—of historical accounts of individual leaders and their lives. As political science began to develop as a discipline in its own right from the nineteenth century on, it developed a more systemic and generalized

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study of leadership. Social scientists from Max Weber on sought to separate individual leaders and their lives from historic contingencies. Indeed, Weber was concerned with the concept of authority, which is what gave leaders the power they possessed and used (Perruci 2004, Perruci and McManus 2013). Distinguishing between three main types, the rational, traditional and charismatic, Weber noted that rational authority was based on the existence of impersonal institutions in which leaders have power by holding formal office. Traditional and charismatic authority owed more to the influence of specific individuals, whether in their respective status as a chief or their emotional appeal to others. The difference between these forms of authority was summarized by Lewis Edinger (1990) as emphasizing the extent of institutionalization which existed in a polity. Where powers were both formally and legally clear, leaders operated within impersonal institutions. By contrast, where such institutions were weaker, leaders employed more personal forms of power. These more personal forms of power were especially important in the institutionally weak environments of Renaissance Europe and post-independence Africa. Getting beyond this stage is often referred to as “nation building.” While Weber looked at institutional factors, he still placed considerable emphasis on the character of the leader. However, later scholars found it difficult to identify—or at least to agree upon—a set of characteristics associated with successful leadership. This led to the development of two alternative approaches—contingency and situational—which emphasized the “context” in which leaders operated (Perruci and McManus 2013, Blondel 1987). Dankwart Rustow expressed the hope that “a systematic and comparative study of leadership processes may enable us to lay to rest the continuing controversy between those who see leadership . . . primarily as an individual attribute or trait and those who prefer to view it as being determined by the situation—as well as the even older debate over the historic influence of great individuals” (in Wiatr 1988). This effort to assess the relative importance of individual traits and social conditions led to systematic research on leaders’ personal history, psychology, traits and family backgrounds to gain insight into their behavior. A key objective of this approach was to provide a means to predict how individual leaders would act in particular circumstances (Brown 2004). However, this proved difficult because leaders’ behavior is often constrained by situational circumstances. So the next paradigm change dealt with leaders’ “situations” rather than their individual characteristics. But the leaders and the situations are not independent entities; they interact. Indeed, perhaps the most important accomplishment of leaders is to change the situation. The next paradigm shift, very much guided by the work of James MacGregor Burns (1978), saw leadership less as a matter of personal traits of leaders or of stable “situations” but as a “process” between leaders

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and followers (Perruci and McManus 2013). As Burns (1978, 19) observed, leadership was a “relationship” where leaders induc[e] followers to act for certain goals that represent the values and the motivations—the wants and needs, the aspirations and expectations—of both leaders and followers. And the genius of leadership lies in the manner in which leaders see and act on their own and their followers’ values and motivations.

The relationship between leaders and followers was central to the contingency approach, which paid less attention to the personal attributes of the leaders and more to the actions taken by leaders and the extent to which they were able to realize them in relationship with their followers. The focus of this approach is on the interactive behavior of the leaders and the followers instead of on stable traits of either party, and especially on the capacity of the leaders to influence and reward their supporters along with other groups. The result was a more functionalist understanding of leaders and their styles (Perruci 2004). The greater awareness accorded to followers prompted analysts to draw attention to particular aspects of the leader-follower relationship. For example, Blondel (1987) noted that the influence of leaders owes much to their position, whether personal or institutional, and the tools available at their disposal. Peter Northouse (2010) suggests that this can include an emphasis on inborn traits (such as height, intelligence, fluency) or on the interactive process between leaders and followers (such as the use of media and the mobilization of interest groups). The focus on the process of interaction does not limit leadership to those supposedly born with it; instead it can be learned and applied by anyone with a certain basic ability level. How leaders hold influence over followers can be differentiated between whether their position is assigned (owing to holding a formal title or office) or emergent (owing to what they do and how they gain support). So contemporary leadership theory focuses on the interplay between political leaders and the institutions and environments in which they operate. That this is emphasized in the present is important to note, since comparisons with earlier periods are not always completely equitable; as we will see when examining the experience of leadership in the Americas, the concerns of particular social groups by individual presidents were much narrower in 1800 than they were in 2000. This reflects the relatively limited section of the population which had an influence on selecting the president in the earlier period when compared to universal suffrage today. Drawing on a range of different countries in the global North and South and between East and West and across different time periods, Ofer Feldman and Linda Valenty (2001, xix) see political leaders as a specific case of a

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wider polity and a reflection of the political behavior, the norms and rules associated with the politics of a given country. In short, accounts of individual political leaders offer insight into the characteristics of the wider population and therefore of the national and political culture of which the leader is a part (Edinger 1990). Burns’ insight into the leader-follower relationship was seminal in another way, in that it provided a means to evaluate the effectiveness of leaders who we will examine when we explore the idea of “greatness” in the next chapter. This was summarized in the two ideal types of leadership: one that was transactional (i.e., where a leader’s actions tend to be similar to those of a manager of political elites and their supporters and where their role is relatively “passive”) or transformational (i.e., where a leader is predominant and his or her capacity to challenge pre-existing behaviors and structures and is therefore more “active”). In contrast to mid-century analysis, this theory entailed a more robust relationship between leaders and followers, which considered the different motivations and behavior of each. This perspective was also advanced by rational choice theory, which placed less emphasis on the subjective considerations and behavior patterns of leaders and more on the objective advantages and disadvantages of exchange transaction between leaders and followers. One result of this view was to raise the significance of followers as a point of analysis in leadership studies (Edinger 1990). Scholars highlighted the relational nature of leadership as an interactive process between leaders and followers; Grint (1997, 1) noted the “enigma [which] surrounds the issue of whether they are pulling or being pushed by those behind them.” Awareness of the increasingly multifaceted nature of leadership demonstrated the growing complexity associated with the subject. Since 2000, Perruci and McManus (2013) have noted that with globalization, there have increasingly been cross-national trends in leadership. Some leaders have focused on universal norms and values, others have played primarily to nationalist themes. Leaders can be evaluated in terms of their values, whether neutral or “good” or “evil,” or according to their level of “effectiveness.” LEADERSHIP AND CONSTITUTIONAL SYTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES AND LATIN AMERICA Political leadership is different in different contexts, and one of the most important of the contexts is the nature of the constitutional system. Broadly speaking, there are three main types of democratic systems: presidential, parliamentary and semi-presidential (Lijphart 1999). In presidentialism, the president is elected separately and (usually) directly by the voters. This constitutional separation ensures that the president has a separate mandate and

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legitimacy and distinct powers from the legislature. In parliamentary systems the executive is derived from the legislature; it is not elected separately but instead is established from within the legislature. As a result, the prime minister does not have an independent mandate and is (theoretically) reliant on continued legislative support. In semi-presidential systems both presidential and parliamentary attributes are combined. The president is elected separately from the parliament, the latter which forms an executive and which may be appointed by the president. But the parliamentary-based executive remains dependent on legislative support, which if it disappears may lead to its dissolution; a fate which cannot befall the president. All of the countries we are examining have had presidential systems, at least for most of their histories, although there is variation in the specific powers of the president from one country to another. Studying the role of the president as leader reflects all the elements associated with leadership studies. As Edinger (1990) notes, presidents have been analyzed in several ways: first, in terms of their personal attributes and skills in managing other political actors; second, in relation to their constitutional authority and capacity in relation to other political institutions such as the legislature or judiciary; and third, in relation to the wider political system and the socioeconomic environment in which it rests. In sum then, the impact of an individual president as leader is assessed in relation to his qualities, values, goals and assessment of the surrounding conditions. The distinction between the individual and the situational in the literature on presidentialism is a key one. At the same time, it is notable that much of the scholarly study can be differentiated at a national level as well, specifically between that associated with the United States as a case and that connected to the Latin American experience. Even though these two bodies of literature share awareness of the individual/situational distinction, their interaction has been relatively limited until recently. Much of the literature on presidentialism in the United States took an early shift away from the “great men” approach and towards the study of institutions; more recently, the focus has been on developing a more theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the subject. By contrast the Latin American literature on presidentialism turned to the study of institutions and their limitations in recent decades before undergoing a similar shift to that in the United States. Moreover, the concept of “great men” still remains an important feature of the literature and it is only recently that the literature appears to have moved on from a normative debate over the relative merits of institutional choice (i.e., whether presidentialism is “good” or “bad” in sustaining democracy and should be replaced with parliamentarism) to analyzing their opportunities and limitations.

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Studying the American Presidency: The Pursuit of Greater Scientific Rigor The study of presidentialism in political science has been dominated by the United States as a case history, and the dominant text in the field has been Richard Neustadt’s Presidential Power, which was first published in 1960. Its central thesis was that the president is relatively weak and is therefore heavily reliant on persuasion or bargaining in order to realize his goals, and hence on his personal skills (Moe 2009, Dickinson 2009). This focus on presidential personalism persisted for some time even though the character of the presidency changed. Much of the literature focused on the empirical study of individual presidents and presidencies and was descriptively rich but theoretically poor. Yet this changed in the decades following Presidential Power and by the 1990s scholarship was becoming more theoretical, analytical and deductive, much of this being associated with a broader turn in political science towards game theory (Moe 2009, Mayer 2009, Wood 2009). Game theory offers a unifying theory of self-interested behavior in which presidents seek to maximize their benefits while minimizing their costs. While a range of rational choice approaches has led to a variety of theories, it tends to rely on formal methods, whereby scholars set out their assumptions and expectations as abstract hypotheses testable with quantitative data (Wood 2009). According to Daniel Galvin (2014), Moe’s work was significant in this regard by highlighting the extent to which presidents sought to change their surroundings. The extent to which they were able to do so depended on the structures, incentives, and resources available to them. The focus on incentives, and the way they were used by presidents and others, contributed to the rational choice approach. Yet if this has become the prevalent paradigm, from the turn of the present century this has begun to change, with rational choice institutionalism, historical institutionalism and the cognitive science of decision-making emerging as three principal alternative approaches (Rockman 2009). Part of the reason for this development was a desire to understand the “downstream” effect of presidential actions, that is, the impact that they had on processes within the situations or structures in which they operated (Galvin 2014). Moe’s account of rational choice’s success in the discipline of political science was contested by scholars working in presidential studies. Skowronek (2009), for instance, objected that the rational choice model assumes perfect knowledge by political actors, that its statistical models depend on an oversimplified model of reality, and that it assumes decisions are made so as to achieve system equilibrium. Several critics (Cohen 2009, Wood 2009) noted that when assumptions and expectations are potentially inaccurate or too broad or narrow, the results and conclusions may well be misleading.

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Many presidential scholars have argued that, while rational choice models are a beginning, theory and methodology in presidential science has to go beyond rational choice (Cohen 2009, Dickinson 2009, Mayer, 2009, Jacobs 2009, Moe 2009). Many scholars have advocated an end to the parochialism of an almost exclusive focus on the United States presidency (see Cohen 2009). This has coincided with increased attention on comparative leadership in general and specifically on comparative presidentialism. Comparative research has detected several patterns that seem to be true of presidential systems in general. First, there is a general tendency for the president to be at the center of a country’s politics, owing to his or her separate election and mandate. Second, both presidents and others have sought to enhance the power of the office in order to meet the public expectations associated with it. Third, despite short term swings between more and less authority, the general long-term trend has been towards greater power for the presidency against other institutions in the political system. This has occurred either by presidents claiming more power themselves or by other actors in the political system ceding it to them. It has been helped by the increased presence of the state in public life and in various policy areas, along with the global norm in favor of democracy, the latter being complementary to presidentialism owing to access to the office being based on direct elections (Mezey 2013, 8–9, 22). Studying Latin American Presidentialism: From Great Men to Value Judgements to Analyzing Stability and Instability The “great man” approach has had remarkable staying power in the Latin American leadership studies, with books that often seem to equate leadership with heroism (see Adams 2010, Harvey 2000, Gott 2011). This reflects the fact that many Latin American leaders have been polarizing figures. Adams (2006, 1), for example, uses the concepts of heroism and leadership interchangeably and associates leaders with being “agents of change” rather than of continuity or stability. There are many more books published about charismatic revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez than about presidents who have been less colorful and more pragmatic, but who may have a more lasting positive impact on their societies. At the same time, the field of Latin American leadership and presidential studies has shifted from the focus on “great men” to the role of institutions and their relative merits and on the way these institutions—formal and informal—interact with each other. The result has been a shift away from normative judgements about the relative merits of presidentialism to analysis that echoes the theories and models being pursued among scholars concerned with the case of the United States, especially rational choice and game theory.

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Latin America’s leaders during the colonial period and into the early nineteenth century struggled to remove the European presence from their countries and to establish independent states. The concepts of freedom and equality were at the forefront of their actions. Later leaders had less clear objectives, not least because of the level of contestation which occurred within Latin American societies. The result was that leaders became engaged in an ongoing struggle to overcome internal differences; a struggle which incorporated common themes across the different countries, including a strong sense of native heritage and resentment of the looming external influence of the United States. The focus on important and “great” leaders persists because people have a psychological need for heroes. Leaders are judged “great” because people need them to be. In his study of Latin American leadership, Gama Perruci (2004) argues that “great” leaders are perceived in three different ways: as human, superhuman and meta-human. These levels link the leader to his followers in different ways. Whereas leaders share common human characteristics and failings with their followers, they are also distinguished by their perceived “superhuman” abilities whereby they stand elevated above their supporters. As superhuman, they are identified with certain traits—e.g., charisma, decisiveness, a willingness to take risks—which makes them different from ordinary people. The meta-human role of leaders comes when followers raise their leaders beyond the human and superhuman, to become part of history. This often involves martyrdom, as in the cases of Emiliano Zapata’s murder in 1919, Getúlio Vargas’ suicide in 1954, and Che Guevara’s death in the Bolivian jungle in 1967. Latin American leaders have been transformational in four ways, which tend to take place sequentially. First, the leader presents a strong image which emphasizes mythic qualities as well as decisiveness. Second, a leader’s vision is adopted by followers as their own. Third, following the leader becomes a goal in itself, even if the leader changes his vision. And fourth, the followers develop a strong emotional bond with the leader. These traits cause many leaders to be highly polarizing, with some citizens strongly linked to a leader and others strongly opposed. Of the four steps, “idea-acceptance” has arguably proved the most challenging for the region’s leaders to realize; followers tend to be more strongly linked to the leader as a person than to his ideas. As we will see, this was a severe problem for the liberators, especially Bolívar and his dream of a unified liberal, republican polity. Studying the fate of “great” Latin American leaders offers insights into the mass psychology of their countries, which helps to explain why, despite their great power, they so often fail. The traits of the leaders are ones that are shared and/or admired by society in general. Historically, the region has been positively disposed towards “men on horseback”: leaders who have assumed influence through their charisma and personal attributes regardless of wheth-

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er they possess institutional authority. These leaders are often presented as the nation’s “savior.” Yet they so often fail precisely because they are viewed as being forces for change. They rise to power with a forceful advocacy of change, but by confronting the status quo they mobilize opposition from political opponents and established elites. Leaders’ impatience and struggle to achieve dramatic change means that their vision increasingly becomes tied up with their own survival. They may adopt a more “dictatorial” approach, which not only confirms the fears of the opposition, but may undermine the leader in the eyes of their followers and contribute to his or her failure (Perruci 2004). An alternative to the individual accounts of Latin American leadership is the institutional approach. Political science in general, and in presidential studies, has placed growing emphasis on the role of institutions in explaining political development. But where the literature on the United States has focused on enhancing theory and developing methodology in the study of presidentialism in recent decades, the literature on Latin America until the 1990s was more concerned with evaluating whether presidential systems are a suitable model for the region or not. This debate coincided with the return of democracy in the region in the 1980s, with Scott Mainwaring (1990) providing an early account of the study of presidentialism in the region. He noted that it was after democracy’s return that Latin Americanist and Latin American scholars begin to pay greater attention to the role of political institutions in Latin America. Indeed, from the 1990s and especially in the past decade and a half, there has been more attention given to other institutions and their impact on presidents. Prior to the 1980s, Mainwaring points out that the previous high point of research on institutions in Latin American literature was during the 1940s and 1950s. In this period scholars emphasized the role of “political institutions as shapers of the political system,” this at just the time when American scholars were beginning to pay greater attention to culture and social structure as determinants of political institutions. They noted the greater importance that presidents held in Latin American political systems compared to the United States system, where a separation of powers was emphasized. Moreover, this early work was dominated by those working in juridical studies (owing to the greater attention given to it in higher education compared to social science or history) and tended to overlook the difference between presidents in democratic and non-democratic settings. The institutional approach fell out of fashion during the 1960s and 1970s when more attention was given to the role of social and economic forces to explain Latin American politics. Of particular significance in this period was the dependency school, which sought to explain why the region’s societies remained underdeveloped despite more than a century of political independence. In its cruder versions, dependency theory argued that colonialism and

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imperialism, first by the Spanish and Portuguese and subsequently by Britain and the United States, had constructed relationships with the region which placed that latter in a subordinate position in the global economic system. The effect was to place Latin America “behind” the richer global North, suggesting that Latin American underdevelopment was structured (and to some extent determined). Institutions began to receive greater attention by scholars during the 1980s. This approach coincided with the third wave of democratization, which took place in southern Europe and South America. The return to democracy animated activists and analysts alike with scholars seeking out what links existed between political institutions and the promotion and strengthening of democracy (Mainwaring 1990). A primary concern for scholars during this time was the extent to which political institutions helped or hindered democracy. It was within this context that presidential systems were evaluated, with much of this literature initially adopting a normative hue. The optimism of the third wave in the 1980s gave way to a more pessimistic view of democratization during the 1990s. Emblematic of this turn was the analysis of “illiberal democracy” by Fareed Zakaria (1997), who noted that many of these new democracies, including, for example, Russia and many countries in Africa, were only surface deep. Elections might be regularly held and contested, but their commitment to civil and political rights were limited. In addition to maintaining many of the authoritarian features of the past, these regimes remained relatively unaccountable and unreceptive to wider public demands, including a failure (or unwillingness) to tackle the inequities associated with the broader neoliberal economic reforms which often coincided with the political change. In Latin America this found expression in what Guillermo O’Donnell (1994) called “delegative democracy,” where the relative weakness and institutionalization of other entities like political parties, the legislature and fixed rules meant that the executive (presidential) branch was in a stronger position. In Latin America, concern about the region’s commitment to democracy prompted scholars to analyze the nature of its regimes. Scott Mainwaring, Daniel Brinks and Aníbal Peréz-Liñán (2001), for example, distinguished between three types: democratic, non-democratic (or authoritarian) and semidemocratic. Presidentialism was subjected to scrutiny as to whether it contributed towards democracy or not. The general consensus was that it did not. Specifically, presidentialism was associated with political instability which could be either inherent or situational. Among the critiques were those which highlighted the constitutional and temporal rigidities of the presidential systems. This included the dual (and therefore competitive) legitimacy of the presidency and congress and the majoritarian nature of the presidency (i.e., “winner takes all”), which does a poor job of protecting or representing

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minorities. In addition, fixed terms and the periodic nature of presidential elections limits the opportunity for quick responses to public dissatisfaction. The situational analysis tended to highlight the crises which occurred in presidential systems, especially when economic austerity contributed to social marginalization and unrest. In such cases the tendency was for political instability to be concentrated on the figure of the president (owing to the personalized nature of presidential systems) and for many to pressure him or her to resign (and if not, for other actors, like the military, to threaten intervention) (Shugart and Carey 1992, Mainwaring and Shugart 1997, Linz and Stepan 1978, Linz 1990, Lijphart 1999, Valenzuela 2004, Lawrence and Hayes 2000). The effect of much of this analysis was for scholars to promote alternative institutional forms for Latin American political systems, chiefly a parliamentary or semi-presidential model. While this type of research reached a high point during the 1990s, a shift has been underway over the last decade. From the late 1990s and early 2000s, scholarship has moved away from advocacy of parliamentarism over presidentialism in the region and towards a recognition that the prevailing institutional system is likely to stay. The result is analysis which is focused less on making normative statements about the desirability of one institutional model over another. Indeed, Daniel Chasquetti (2008) summarized the trend by noting that by the 1990s there was a contradiction in scholarship in the region: on one side there was concern with presidential systems’ contribution to regime stability; on the other side there were developments which suggested democracy was being consolidated. To explain this, scholars moved away from the relative (de)merits of presidential systems to analyzing what factors and under what circumstances presidential systems were stable or not. Greater attention was paid to the relationship between different institutions, including the relationship between the executive and legislature and the role of presidents’ legislative powers (e.g., decree powers, vetoes and their ability to offer amendatory vetoes), and the nature of the party system (Mainwaring 1993, Alemán and Schwartz 2006, Alemán and Tsebelis 2005, Figueiredo and Limongi 2001, Pereira et al. 2005, Siavelis 2000). The question of the party system encouraged scholars to consider its multiple nature (in contrast to the persistent two-party model in the United States) and how unchecked this might weaken the president’s authority; consequently presidents invested much time and effort in building broad governing coalitions across several parties by offering ministerial posts to rivals and in order to build sufficient majorities in congress (Amorim Neto 2000, 2006, Martínez-Gallardo 2010). In essence the goal of such work was to explain how stability could be achieved in some cases while, in others, why presidentialism and political instability appear to coincide and sometimes result in

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failure (Hochstetler 2006, Marsteintredet and Berntzen 2008, Edwards 2015). One observation about such analysis is the relatively limited period which such work has covered. This is in contrast to other, longer historical accounts of Latin American politics which have emerged in recent years, such as those by Gabriel Negretto (2013) and Roberto Gargarella (2013). However, in both these instances, the authors are concerned more with broader political developments than the operation of the presidential system, namely the formation and development of Latin American constitutions. Of the two, Gargarella offers a broader account, distinguishing between three constitutional models—elite conservative, “neutral” liberal, and radical/republican—which have been present in the region since 1800. But he notes that most constitutions have shared elements of the conservative and liberal approaches, reflecting constitution framers’ wariness of more radical—and socially inclusive—interpretations. By contrast Negretto offers a more limited account of constitutional change in three countries (Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador) in the second half of the twentieth century and focuses on the issues which drive actors to cooperate or not over constitutional reform. He notes not only electoral expansion but also changes in the president’s role to include more law-making powers but less direct influence in governance as a result of decentralization (Wang and Pivatto 2014, Ginsburg 2014–15). While both offer important contributions to understanding Latin American political history in its wider context, these works focus primarily on the question of constitutional change. As a result, they are somewhat limited since they address only one aspect of political change, namely in the political sphere (e.g., executive-legislative relations, electoral reform). While this book complements that work, we also go beyond it. We do not restrict ourselves to constitutional reform but other forms of change and its institutionalization that presidents have contributed towards since independence, including in the economic and social (e.g., welfare) spheres. Finally, even though the themes of concern in presidential studies in Latin America have moved on, from “great men” to value judgements to greater analytical rigor, this does not mean that normative assessments have completely disappeared. Indeed, the period between the mid-2000s until the mid2010s saw the rise and decline of the so-called “pink tide” as leftist presidents took power across the region. Heralding their rise, Jorge Castañeda (2006) proposed a typology of two types of presidents. Although not explicitly stating a preference, the labels used offered some indication: one side were those who were “reformers”—that is, outward facing and cosmopolitan, like Lula da Silva in Brazil and Michelle Bachelet in Chile—and others who were “radicals” or populists, who were more nationalist and inward focused, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. As the pink tide now appears to be receding in the mid-2010s, more attention is being given

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to explain the circumstances under which such leaders have apparently lost their luster (see Mollona 2016, Ivancheva 2016, Grisaffi 2016, Lazar 2016, Saad-Filho 2016). CONCLUSION This chapter has examined the development of leadership studies in the United States and in Latin America and the shift from focusing on “great men” to a greater awareness and understanding of the wider context in which leaders operate, and finally on how the leaders can interact with and even change the social context. We have noted the parallel courses leadership study has taken in the United States and in Latin America, the former motivated by attempts at greater scientific rigor and the latter concerned with identifying the effectiveness of presidential government over other kinds before shifting towards similar concerns in American scholarship since the 1900s. In the chapters to come we consider what “transformational” leadership is before considering the relative merits of US and Latin American experiences of presidential government. We note the differences as well as their similarities and propose a historical perspective that reflects common themes that occurred both north and south of the Rio Grande. In so doing we are able to draw out the experience of particular leaders, the contexts in which they operated, and the ways in which they shaped and transformed their societies. This then leads to four chapters which examine the role of key presidents (and some other important political figures) in the eight countries selected for investigation. Each president’s route to power, the base of his or her support, and the main policies adopted are considered within each country and set time period. Following this, we then adopt a comparative approach, to identify which of these individuals is worthy of the label “transformational.”

Chapter Two

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

The United States declared independence in 1776 and the majority of the new Latin American states did so in the first decades of the next century. This was a period when the prevailing model of government was monarchy and in which an individual sat at the center of the political system. Parliamentarism had not yet developed into an alternative; prime ministers only supplanted monarchs as chief executives in the nineteenth century in Europe. Instead, the American revolutionaries invented a presidential system (Ginsberg et al. 2010) modelled on Roman precedents. They wanted a chief executive, but they wanted to limit and constrain his powers in ways that the English king was not constrained at the time. So they created a constitutional separation of powers with checks and balances on the different institutions within the system. The US presidency evolved into a very powerful position. The president is often described as the most powerful person in the world. But this is really more the power of the nation than of the individual in office. There are certainly other leaders who have exercised greater power within their own societies, including several included in this study. Studying the history of the US presidency, Richard Neustadt (1990, ix) remarked that “weakness is what I see, weakness in the sense of a great gap between what is expected of a man (or someday a woman) and assured capacity to carry through.” Perhaps that weakness of the top leader is part of what made the nation strong. The leaders in the United States seem to think so: they have stuck with the original constitution for its entire history, with only infrequent amendments to correct flaws. Many nineteenth-century Latin American leaders also admired the US constitution and adopted similar documents for their own countries, with a division of powers between executive, legislative and 17

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judicial branches of government. But they did not follow the US model wholesale, and they do not often elevate their constitutions into sacred objects as the Americans do. Latin American nations tend to change their constitutions from time to time, seeking to correct flaws or incorporate new insights. The Latin American constitutions are distinct from the US model in several ways, including a greater degree of executive law-making powers including decree powers and the ability to impose legislation as “provisional measures” (Ginsberg et al. 2010). “That government is best that governs least” is not a saying that appeals to many Latin Americans, since in Latin American history weak central government has often led to chaotic warfare between caudillos (agrarian warlords) and more recently between guerrillas and drug gangs. Latin Americans have often judged their presidents too weak in practice or, if they were more assertive, disagreed with what they were doing. When they were dissatisfied with their presidents, they did not always wait for elections, but resorted to revolutions or coups d’état to put more decisive but less democratic governments into power. Constitutional limitations did not restrain presidents such as Juan Manuel de Rosas, Getúlio Vargas, or Augusto Pinochet. They simply changed the constitution to fit their style. But the authoritarian regimes they created ran into problems just as severe as the democratic ones, or worse, and their countries cycled back to democracy. Today, most Latin Americans are committed to making presidential democracy work. It is obvious that many, if not most, of the key leaders of the Americas were presidents of their nations, although in the earliest days of independence some of them had other titles. But we did not want to limit our analysis to presidents if there were other leaders who were equally or more consequential. So we designed a procedure to identify the leaders who had been most important in shaping the histories of our eight republics. We were not looking for the “best” leaders, or for those who deserve to be called “great.” Very important historical leaders include Adolph Hitler and Joseph Stalin as well as Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. In reading history, our impression was that historians generally agree about which leaders were most outstanding, even when they did not agree on which one were best in any way. We decided to check this impression with a simple quantitative tally of mentions of leaders in widely used history textbooks. Since 1948 there have been regular efforts to rank US presidents based on polls of historians and political scientists, combined with more quantitative assessments in recent decades. But there have been no such studies for Latin America. We considered doing a poll of Latin Americanists on the topic, but many Latin Americanists are specialists on only one country or a group of countries, or on one topic or one historical period. We would have had to do a separate poll for each country. Instead of doing that, we decided to rely on the very impressive work of authors of histories of Latin America.

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

19

We wanted to apply the same method to the United States as we did to Latin America, just to make things comparable. We expected that a tally of textbooks would give similar results to the surveys that had been done of experts, and this turned out to be the case. IDENTIFYING OUTSTANDING LEADERS IN LATIN AMERICA The books used to identify outstanding Latin American presidents and political leaders are not strictly comparable, they were published on different dates and the definition of Latin America varies in that some include Haiti and some do not. The authors also sometimes choose to focus on certain historical periods or episodes in more depth than others, without necessarily asserting that they are more important. Their goal, after all, was not to rank leaders. Despite these differences, however, we found considerable consistency among the books. We doubt that the results would vary much if we included more histories, except that more recent editions would naturally include more recent leaders. For this kind of quantitative tally, one must adopt certain arbitrary criteria. Our basic tool was the indexes to the books. We included any political leader whose name was indexed to at least three pages of any of the four books. This is arbitrary, of course, in that a discussion of the same length may sometimes be on one page or sometimes split between two. But we thought that if a name appeared on three or more pages that meant the author felt the figure merited inclusion in a list of outstanding political leaders. We tallied only political leaders since 1800, not figures from the colonial era. We included only people whose eminence was political, not those whose fame was primarily or exclusively as writers or artists or philosophers or scientists. Thus, Mario Vargas Llosa was not on the list because there were not enough citations to his political activities. However, José Martí, José Mariátegui and José Vasconcelos were included as their impact was primarily political. We did not limit the list to presidents as one of our goals was to see how the presidents compared to other leaders. This listing is based on four books. The most recent is Modern Latin America, eighth edition, by Thomas Skidmore, Peter Smith and James Green. It was published in 2014, substantially revised and updated from previous editions. The second is The Penguin History of Latin America, revised and updated in 2009, by Edwin Williamson. Both of these books are quite lengthy and comprehensive, except that the second does not include Haiti. The third is The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures, by Marshall Eakin, 2007 edition. This book is somewhat shorter and, as the title implies, focuses more on culture than on politics. The fourth is A History of Latin

20

Chapter 2

America, ninth edition, by Benjamin Keen and Keith Haynes, published in 2004. We wanted to include texts written by Latin American scholars, and did find three comparable volumes (Halperin Donghi 2013, Wasserman 1996, Zanatta 2012). Unfortunately, none of them had an index. Our criteria yielded a list of 117 leaders, of whom 86 or 74 percent were president of their country, although a few had attained fame before reaching the presidency. Of those without the title of “President,” many were from a historical period before the office of president had been established in their country, including four “Emperors,” one “Protector,” one “Supreme Director,” and one “Consul.” Several others were revolutionaries or party activists who never achieved the top leadership role in their country. Very few were primarily legislators or governors of states, although many had played those roles before achieving the presidency. While we list the 25 most mentioned in table 2.1, a complete list is available in appendix A. The four books are reasonably consistent in the leaders who appear on their pages, especially the first two books, which are longer and make more of an attempt to be comprehensive rather than thematic histories. Simón Bolívar’s historical importance is unquestioned, and has stood the test of time, so he deserves his place on top of the list. It would be difficult to argue that Fidel Castro’s impact on Latin American history has been equivalent, despite his equal ranking in the index. Although he inspired the revolutionary left throughout Latin America, his political rule was confined to an island of greater symbolic than geographical or economic importance. One reason for Fidel Castro’s high rating in our index is simply his longevity as the most prominent political leader in Cuba after 1959. But it may be the case that future historians will devote fewer pages to the Cuban experience. The same may be true of Hugo Chávez and his campaign for “twenty-first century socialism,” which is not doing very well as we write in 2016. Similarly, Lula da Silva was treated extensively in the first book, but much less so in the others, and he may not be given such extensive treatment by future historians. Some of the presidents were important leaders who made lasting changes in their societies, e.g., Porfirio Díaz, Juan Perón, Benito Juarez and Getúlio Vargas. Others were heroic figures who symbolized important but losing causes, e.g., Salvador Allende, Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata, Victor Haya de la Torre, and José Mariátegui. Others were dictators or warlords who ruled through terror and whose historical impact is controversial at best, e.g., Juan Manuel Rosas, Pancho Villa, Augusto Pinochet, Victoriano Huerta, and Rafael Trujillo. But this is not a list of Latin America’s best leaders. Some of them were scoundrels and others were well-intentioned failures. They are simply the leaders who were important to the extent that historians found it necessary to discuss them at some length in writing the history of Latin America since independence.

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

21

Table 2.1. Page Citations of Latin American Presidents and Political Leaders Pages Cited in Each Text Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identification

Bolívar, Simón

18.75

22

18

23

12

Liberator and Various Pres.

Castro, Fidel

18.75

18

35

15

7

President of Cuba

Chávez, Hugo

14.75

27

17

3

12

President of Venezuela

Díaz, Porfirio

12.25

10

18

11

10

President of Mexico

Vargas, Getúlio

10.5

11

17

3

11

President of Brazil

Allende, Salvador

9.5

8

14

6

10

President of Chile

Perón, Juan

9.5

6

18

2

12

President of Argentina

Pinochet, Augusto

8.5

10

12

3

9

President of Chile

Silva, Lula

8

21

3

2

6

President of Brazil

Zapata, Emiliano

8

5

10

8

9

Mexican Revolutionary

Guevara, Che

7.25

10

13

5

1

Cuban Revolutionary

Batista, Fulgencio

6.5

4

8

8

6

President of Cuba

Pedro II

6.25

12

4

7

2

Emperor of Brazil

Rosas, Juan Manuel

6.25

9

10

2

4

President of Argentina

Villa, Pancho

6.25

6

6

7

6

President of Mexico

Obregon, Alvaro

6

2

10

7

5

President of Mexico

Goulart, João

5.75

5

10

0

8

President of Brazil

Sarmiento, Domingo

5.75

2

12

5

4

President of Argentina

Fujimori, Alberto

5.5

6

5

2

9

President of Peru

San Martín, José

5.5

5

5

7

5

Protector of Peru

Martí, José

5.5

3

8

6

5

Cuban Revolutionary

Frei, Eduardo

5.25

8

7

2

4

President of Chile

Cárdenas, Lázaro

5.25

6

2

5

8

President of Mexico

Madero, Francisco

5.25

3

7

4

7

President of Mexico

Carranza, Venustiano 5.25

2

7

6

6

President of Mexico

Note: Mean: Average number of pages on which the leader is cited in the four books; Book 1: Skidmore, Smith, and Green, 2014 edition; Book 2: Williamson, 2009 edition; Book 3: Eakin, 2007 edition; Book 4: Keen and Haynes, 2004 edition. Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

22

Chapter 2

IDENTIFYING OUTSTANDING LEADERS IN THE UNITED STATES We are not the first to rank presidents of the United States, although our study is different by including other important leaders as well. Many studies conducted surveys of experts asking their judgment as to which leaders were “transformational” or “great.” Of course, historians do not always agree, and opinions sometimes change over time as current concerns shape our judgments about the past (Merry 2012). Once the selection is made, the transformational presidents can be compared with transactional ones on empirical measures. Nice (in Simonton 1987) suggested that greatness was related with emphasizing international rather than isolationist foreign policies, surviving assassination attempts after their election, declaring wars or having them sanctioned by congress, being an active user of their veto power, and engaging the country in overseas military action. Murray and Blessing (1988) attempted to quantify the performance of US presidents in an effort to identify “greatness.” They found little correlation between individual biographies and performance in the White House in matters such as appearance, background, religion or region. Instead the attributes they saw as most significant were those of decisiveness, intelligence, vision and courage—characteristics which become more visible at particular crisis moments such as a war or a severe economic downturn. Like Nice, they also emphasized the fact that such presidents also had to provide a legacy, by leaving their mark on a particular period and the country. Landy and Milkis (2000) echoed these observations. For them “greatness” was associated with leaving a legacy in the form of principles, institutional arrangements or policies and being founders or re-founders of their political parties. Other attributes included the conservation or maintenance of the constitutional order, either by getting it to work or by expanding it. Foreign policy probably weighs more heavily in evaluations of US presidencies than it does in Latin America because of the central role of the United States in the world system and in global conflicts. Instead of doing another survey of expert opinion, we used published history books as our data source to be comparable with our analysis of Latin American leaders. These books crystallize the carefully considered judgments of their authors. The expert surveys done in the United States, since Arthur Schlesinger Jr. conducted his first poll in 1948 (Nelson 1989, 1996), have limited their scope to presidents. We broke with this tradition and included political leaders in general, regardless of the office they held. It turns out that most of the top cited leaders were presidents, but this is a finding of our research, not an assumption. We used the indices in five US histories. As with our tally of Latin American leaders, we limited this to political leaders, excluding writers,

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

23

artists, religious leaders and scientists. We did, however, include business magnates since that role inevitably brings political involvement. Including the writers, artists, religious leaders and scientists would not have changed the results appreciably since they generally had only a few citations in each book. We looked first for brief history books, with the thought that they would highlight the most important leaders. But we also wanted ideological diversity, so we added a conservative and a leftist book even though they were longer. The first book tallied was Philip Jenkins (2012), A History of the United States. This book is part of the Palgrave Essential History Series and offers a standard account. Jenkins is a very widely published historian. The second book was Robert Remini (2009), A Short History of the United States. Remini is a distinguished historian specializing in the Jacksonian period. The third book was Andrew Sinclair (1999), A Concise History of the United States. Sinclair is an established author both of histories and of novels. This book is a little older, and we did not include it in calculating the ranking for individuals who became prominent after 1999. The fourth book was Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen (2004), A Patriot’s History of the United States. This book promises a history of America as a “bright and shining light” in contrast to other books that it believes to be biased by political correctness. Schweikart and Allen are both history professors with distinguished publication records. The fifth book was Howard Zinn (2005), A People’s History of the United States. This book has sold over a million copies and focuses on the role of labor leaders, war resisters, fugitive slaves and others from the oppressed strata of society. The last two books are quite lengthy and comprehensive and naturally cover many more leaders than the brief histories. There were a few differences in the indexing procedures in the book. One book indexed two whole chapters of the book under the “nationalism of George Washington” even though many of the pages do not include his name. Other books referred readers to the chapter on the Civil War for Abraham Lincoln or to the chapter on World War II for Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), or used the abbreviation passim to indicate that many more references to Lincoln were scattered through an entire section of the book. We adjusted these tallies by checking for references on the actual pages, but this is a tiresome process (for us as well as the indexers). This problem only happened with the cases of Washington, Lincoln and FDR, which means that their ranking might have been even higher than shown here. As in our tally of Latin American leaders, we included any political leader who was indexed on three or more of the pages of any of the five histories. We have given a brief identification for each leader, although most of them actually filled many roles over their lifetime.

24

Chapter 2

The sum total was 217 political leaders across the historical period since independence. Our first observation is that despite including a wide range of political leaders, almost all of the top 25 leaders were presidents of the United States, although all of them held other positions prior to that. The top non-presidents were Henry Clay, a senator who also had presidential aspirations, and Alexander Hamilton, who might have achieved the presidency had he not died in a duel at the age of 48 or 50 (there is some doubt about his year of birth). Our second observation is that the five books are generally in agreement about which presidents were most important. This includes our two more ideologically defined books, which differ sharply in their judgments of leaders such as Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan, but give them about the same amount of space. The books also largely report the same events and even their judgments are more similar than one might expect. The People’s History includes many leftist activists ignored by the other books, while the Patriot’s History highlights more military leaders, but this is in addition to covering the key leaders who are given more space. The third point to make is that despite the different methodology we used to draw up our list of important presidents and political leaders, the findings are broadly in line with the regular expert polls that Siena College Research Institute conducts on the same. The Institute has carried out surveys of presidential scholars in 1982, 1990, 1994, 2002, and 2010. Consistently at the top of these polls are FDR, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jefferson, and Washington, who have occupied the top five slots even as they have shuffled around over the years. Below them, there has been some variation, although some names are also prominent in both the Institute’s rankings and our list: Wilson, Truman, Kennedy, Eisenhower, Madison, and Monroe occupying the next six positions. As will become apparent in the chapters which follow, the positions of these presidents owe much to the circumstances in which they operated as well as their capacity for action. Washington was the first president of the new American republic, thereby settling in place the parameters which future chief executives would follow. Adams and Jefferson, his immediate successors, also played a role in consolidating the position of the presidency and its relationship to the wider political system. Lincoln and FDR both steered the country through war and adopted policies which had a significant impact on the future direction of the country: emancipation of the slaves and the New Deal, respectively. At the same time, our list includes several presidents who do not appear at the top of other presidential rankings or polls such as George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Like the Latin American histories we referred to, their names may be higher in our list because of their relatively

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

25

recent tenure in office; authors may have been keen to bring their studies of US political history up to date. It is also striking to note that while we included other political leaders in our list, of those there tended to be more congressional leaders than we found in our tally of Latin American histories. This might be explained on two main grounds. One is that it reflects differences in the relatively early consolidation of political institutions such as Congress in the United States when compared to Latin America, where institutions were subject to greater volatility and conflict and the prevailing form of governance for much of its independent history was largely authoritarian. Another may be that our Latin American histories covered a wide region rather than a single country, making it difficult to identify so many leaders. If we were to do this exercise separately for each Latin American country, we might identify more congressional leaders. CONCLUSION There are few surprises in our results, which is a good thing. No really central figures are missing, and those who appear make sense. If a leader is missing from the abbreviated tables in this chapter, he or she probably appears in the longer tables in the appendices. Our results do reflect some of the limitations of our method; the history books were not written for our purposes. There is some bias towards more recent presidents in both analyses. Although we used only books which covered the whole of the post-independence history of the United States and Latin America, the authors may have given more attention to the recent than to the more distant past. But we are pleased that the results do not seem to reflect significant ideological bias, however. Writers of comprehensive histories give as much attention to leaders they hate as to those they love. Of course, our rankings by themselves tell us nothing of the experiences and accomplishments of the individuals in the tables. But the surveys done by other scholars do offer some generalizations which we can use, together with our general knowledge of Latin American history, to raise some questions to be addressed in the chapters to come. We began this book with some observations about two of the hemisphere’s founding fathers—Simón Bolívar and George Washington. We will explore the role of each in chapter 4. But it seems clear that it would be very difficult to imagine Simón Bolivar in Philadelphia or George Washington in Caracas or Bogotá. The same could be said of the Latin American leaders we identified from the middle of the last century, such as Getúlio Vargas, Juan Perón, and Lazaro Cárdenas, or of more recent presidents such as Hugo

Chapter 2

26

Table 2.2. Page Citations of US Presidents and Political Leaders Pages Cited in Each Book Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identification

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano

27.6

15

33

20

47

23

President

Lincoln, Abraham

23.2

19

24

11

46

16

President

Jefferson, Thomas

18

5

27

11

37

10

President

Jackson, Andrew

17.6

7

35

7

22

17

President

Washington, George

16.2

6

23

7

34

11

President

Bush, George W.

16

14

14

NA

29

7

President

Clinton, Bill

15.8

8

12

3

34

22

President

Reagan, Ronald

15.4

7

15

4

27

24

President

Truman, Harry

15.2

1

16

8

26

25

President

Roosevelt, Theodore

14.8

4

10

8

35

17

President

Nixon, Richard

13.2

2

11

7

22

24

President

Wilson, Woodrow

13.2

2

12

10

32

10

President

Madison, James

10.8

5

15

4

23

7

President

Eisenhower, Dwight

10.6

0

13

12

16

12

President

Bush, George H. W.

10.4

0

10

3

15

24

President

Kennedy, John F.

10

3

12

6

12

17

President

Clay, Henry

9.6

2

23

3

18

2

Senator

Adams, John

9.2

2

15

3

19

7

President

Grant, Ulysses

9.2

4

16

6

17

3

President

Johnson, Lyndon B.

9

1

8

5

13

18

President

Hamilton, Alexander

8.8

3

13

5

15

8

Founding Father

Carter, Jimmy

8.2

1

7

3

17

13

President

McKinley, William

8.2

0

8

3

20

10

President

Johnson, Andrew

7.6

3

15

4

14

2

President

Adams, John Q.

7.2

1

17

2

13

3

President

Note: Mean: Average number of pages on which the leader is cited in the five books; Book 1: Jenkins 2012; Book 2: Remini 2009; Book 3: Sinclair 1999; Book 4: Schweikart and Allen 2004; Book 5: Zinn 2005. Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

Chávez, Lula da Silva, Alberto Fujimori and Fidel Castro. Each has to be evaluated in his national and historical context.

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

27

This conclusion puts us squarely in the “historical institutionalist” camp in presidential studies, as discussed in the last chapter. The presidents, and other leaders, who were highlighted in our quantitative analysis were active and visionary presidents and exercised transformational leadership by changing the political reality in which they operated—and doing so in a manner which lasted for a significant period of time. To understand their role, we will have to have do a basic review of the history of each country. By their nature, these transformations are quite varied. Some involve the introduction of a specific policy package which transforms people’s lives (e.g., the introduction of social security). Some are the introduction of a new constitutional order that pre-empts emerging social and economic changes or harnesses them and thereby fashioning new forms of political support (e.g., party, Congress, societal) for a president. Examples of this include the introduction of the New Deal by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States and the expanded state involvement in employment generation under Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Perón in Argentina. Examples include Washington’s allowing and encouraging the Continental Congress to develop a new constitutional order for the United States, Andrew Jackson’s appeal to the frontiersman in the United States, and Lázaro Cárdenas’ construction of a corporatist party system in Mexico. These examples, and many others suggested by the names of the presidents identified in our tally, suggest some tentative conclusions to be examined in the chapters to come. Political Innovation Takes Place in Times of Crisis Transformational leadership is needed, and is most likely to appear, in times of crisis. This might involve an extreme economic crisis or an actual threat to national life through war, which may either be internal or external: a civil war or a conflict against another country (Simonton 1987, Abbott 1996). Such moments offer the chance to introduce new policies or measures by leaders. Transformational Leaderships Forms a New Political Consensus To be truly transformational, new ways of dealing with extreme crises must have broader and longer-lasting consequences, including the construction of a new political or constitutional order or the establishment of a new political consensus and/or coalition which is supported by the key social and economic actors in the country at that particular time. Transformative presidents are likely to actively seek to change the political behavior of their constituents, especially those who are their followers and supporters.

28

Chapter 2

Transformative Changes Must be Institutionalized To be truly transformative, a political innovation has to become a lasting part of the political life of the country, not lasting forever, but for at least a few decades or a generation. This aspect of leadership is arguably the most challenging, since it is mostly out of the hands of an individual president; it requires institutionalization beyond his or her own political (and perhaps biological) lifetime. Some presidents try to solve this by staying in office for decades, but a change is unlikely to be well institutionalized if it depends on a single individual. Of course, it is difficult to judge how well institutionalized a change is until we have historical perspective (Landy and Milkis 2000). Some of the recent presidents highlighted in our tally may not seem to be transformational after a few decades have passed. The Concept of “Greatness” Is Confusing and Subjective We believe that some of the past research on presidential leadership has been confusing because it asked experts to judge the “greatness” of presidents. This confuses the extent of a president’s impact with whether the analyst believes it was good or bad. Most Latin Americanists would vehemently deny that Augusto Pinochet was a “great” president, but they would not deny that he transformed Chilean politics and society. Evil leaders can be transformational, but it is hard to objectively specify the basis for classifying leaders as good or evil. Both Abraham Lincoln and Augusto Pinochet are credited by some with having “saved” their countries: Lincoln by winning a civil war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives and Pinochet by rescuing it from the threat of one by killing a comparatively small number of leaders from the other side and imprisoning others. Yet while Lincoln’s name gained glory beyond the actual war itself—by freeing the slaves and articulating a national vision that made the war seem worthwhile—Pinochet’s elimination of the threat of war came at enormous cost, from the human rights abuses and lives extinguished in the aftermath of the 1973 coup to the economic destruction wrought on the most vulnerable groups in Chilean society as a result of profound structural adjustment. But whatever one thinks about Lincoln’s and Pinochet’s morality and accomplishments, there is no question that their presidencies constituted breaks with the past, introduced new relationships between state and society, and had long-lasting effects. A similar re-evaluation is now taking place with regard to US president Andrew Jackson, who gave his name to a political regime in presidential history after 1828. In the early attempts at rankings, Jackson’s name was rated highly, for overseeing the emergence of a new political constituency and the establishment of a more democratic age. More

Identifying the Outstanding Leaders of the Americas

29

recently, Jackson has been increasingly criticized for the forced removal of Native Americans and his exploitation of the Washington spoils system for patronage purposes. His image may be removed from the twenty-dollar bill. In the past, US President James Polk was widely praised for expanding the national territory; today it is uncomfortably recognized that this was largely due to US-prompted aggression against Mexico (Merry 2012). President Woodrow Wilson, usually praised as a progressive and internationalist, has recently been severely criticized for his unabashed racist attitudes, although these were typical for his time period and the community he came from. This kind of criticism is appropriate to decisions about which president to honor on currency or with statues on public squares or college campuses. But it reflects current values and priorities more than judgment about historical impact. We, of course, have our opinions about which leaders were good, which not so good, and which positively destructive. Sometimes we disagree with colleagues who are at least as well informed as we are. These differences depend partly on how much one values outcomes such as liberty, equality and security. They also depend very much on differences in judgment about counterfactuals, about what might have been. We differ much less with colleagues about what actually happened in history, although we sometimes differ about which facts are most important. In the chapters to come, we will be as objective as we can be about the facts, and explicit about how we draw conclusions from them.

Chapter Three

Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics

Much less systematic attention has been paid to the rise and fall of political regimes in Latin America than in the United States or Europe (Schlesinger Jr. 1949, 1986, Klingberg 1952, Ortega y Gasset 1961, Elazar 1993, Skowronek 1993). Latin Americanists may be reluctant to consider cyclical patterns out of a fear that unhappy histories will repeat themselves. And problems do tend to recur, but not in exactly the same way. The spiral is a better metaphor for political time than the pendulum. Historical change is cyclical in some respects, progressive in others. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) saw the political cycles in the United States as an alternation between “two parties which divide the state, the party of Conservatism and the party of Innovation.” A similar struggle between conservatives and liberals has played a very important part in Latin American history. Periods of progressive change have often alternated with periods of backlash or stasis. But political cycles are too complex, and patterns too varied, to be reduced to such a simple dichotomy. Generational change is an important contributor to the decay and rebirth of political regimes. Generational changes are international in scope and encompass social, intellectual, cultural and economic as well as political life. The most sophisticated generational theories look at how generational consciousness is shaped by major historical events that occur while members of a generation are young and forming their political understanding (Burnett 2010, Howe and Strauss 1991, Mannheim 1952, Mentré 1920, Goertzel 1972). Although children are born every year, major shifts in generational consciousness seem to take place over twenty-five- to thirty-year periods. 31

32

Chapter 3

Historians typically divide the histories of the countries they study into distinct historical eras or epochs. There is no one way to do this and there are various theoretical (Besserman 1996) and empirical (Grinin 2007) criteria for periodizing history. Some writers are most interested in technological or literary or artistic developments. These tend to be global, so the same eras can be observed in many countries. Others focus on the political paths taken by countries, which tend to vary more. Since our interest is in presidential leadership, we focus on shifts in political regimes, which are often shaped by transformational presidents. Our analysis includes both long and short periods of political development. The long periods are progressive and reflect enduring changes in economic and social infrastructure and in the economy. They are global and all of the countries examined here have gone through them, some more quickly than others. The shorter periods of change are primarily political and are different for each country. They are more likely to be cyclical, rather than progressive, i.e., alternating from one side of the political spectrum to the other. They reflect different ways that countries’ leaders deal with the challenges of the long historical time periods. To keep the distinction clear in this book, we refer to the long periods as “historical eras” and to the shorter periods as “political regimes” although this terminology is not consistent in the literature. Our use of the term “political regime” follows Skowronek, but some writers refer to these shorter periods as “eras” or as “ages” (as in “The Age of Jackson”), especially if the time period they analyze is not as long as ours. Our analysis of the historical eras and political regimes is only possible because of the excellent histories that are available for each nation. The works of these historians, and of some historically oriented political scientists, provide the data for our study. Our basic idea is to take the knowledge and insight gathered by the historians and apply it to the theoretical issues raised by political scientists and sociologists. Historians are often skeptical of the effort to generalize about historical processes, while political scientists sometimes generalize very broadly based on limited historical evidence. We seek to find a balance. Based on the work of historians, we have identified four long periods of development—historical eras—which are common across the histories of the American nations. These reflect challenges that they all faced as part of global historical development, based in part on the work of Ginsberg et al. (2010). The four historical eras are:

Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics

33

INDEPENDENCE AND ITS AFTERMATH This initial stage took place earlier in the United States than in Latin America, and in Brazil it was moderated by the fact that the Portuguese monarchy had moved to Brazil in 1808. In the Spanish American republics, the independence struggle was triggered when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, and lasted for about two decades of bitter struggle before advocates of independence finally triumphed over Spanish and loyalist forces. And after independence was achieved, there was the challenge of replacing it with at least a rudimentary political structures to maintain order and resolve conflicts. This proved extraordinarily difficult in a number of countries. NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION The next challenge was to unify the countries, defining borders and developing a system of governance. At the time of independence, it was not clear what the borders would be. Portuguese-speaking America managed to stay integrated in one country with a population equal to that of the nine Spanishspeaking South American nations that we know today. Mexico was united for a time with the Central American nations, and it lost almost half its territory to the expansion of the United States. The United States expanded its dominion across the continent, although respecting the border with Canada. Economically, the period of national consolidation was focused largely on agricultural production for domestic use and export, and on mining for mineral exports. The Latin American nations were more focused on plantation agriculture for export, similar to the southern states in the United States. In the north, and increasingly in the Midwest and West, the United States was predominately a nation of family farmers, a pattern that also prevailed in certain parts of Latin America such as Costa Rica and parts of Chile. The period of national consolidation was largely a struggle between elites to establish a political order which could win the loyalty, or at least the acceptance, of the majority of the population. There was some development of political parties during this period, some of which were only elite efforts, but some of which included mass popular mobilization. In the United States, this effort failed because of the regional split over the slavery issue, and the nation was finally consolidated only through war. STATE DEVELOPMENT All the countries went through a long period of expansion of the powers and role of the state, along with the growth of industry. Economically, this was

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Chapter 3

triggered by crises in the export economy which led to government efforts to promote industrialization, either through government-funded projects or through protection of “infant industries” in the private sector, or some combination. The expansion of the state was also a response to the growth of middle classes and urban working classes that demanded more services, and the influence of ideologies that valued the contribution that government should make to the education, health and welfare of its citizens. Political parties and mass participation grew stronger during the third stage, often leading to bitter conflicts which were sometimes settled violently. As the economies grew, governments began to develop the administrative apparatus to be able to access tax revenues. They began to grow and expand, providing white-collar jobs for a new class of bureaucrats as well as other agents of the state, including a national army and state or national police forces, along with nascent public school and health systems. This stage of development lasted from the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the middle part of the twentieth century. NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND ITS AFTERMATH In the fourth stage, there was a reaction against the growth of state bureaucracies, and an emphasis on market economics and openness to international trade. This happened very differently from country to country. In the United States, it was done through electoral politics with the election of Ronald Reagan. In Chile, there was a vicious military coup d’état against an elected democratic socialist government. In Mexico, the process was guided by a one-party state that had its origins in the revolution of 1910. In Brazil, neoliberalism came not with the military coup d’état in 1964 but after the restoration of democracy and the inflation crisis of the 1980s. The era of neoliberalism came when a combination of factors contributed to undermine the prevailing economic and political consensus. Rising input prices (especially oil) made it more costly for the state to maintain its primary role in development. Foreign finance through private loans was increasingly used, contributing to a build-up in public debt. This process became unsustainable and in 1982 Mexico and other countries defaulted. This ushered in a period of structural adjustment as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as lender of last resort provided conditional loans which included reductions in public spending and the size of the state and a greater role for the private sector in the economy and social welfare. The shift to market-friendly economics was accompanied by ideological currents that argued that many government programs had become more burdensome than progressive, and by debt and inflation crises in many of the countries. There are still significant forces in Latin America that seek to

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break away from the neoliberal paradigm. These forces insist that “another world is possible” but are only beginning to suggest what that world could be. These changes had a profound impact on the nature of state-society relations across the region. The corporatist models combined with social security for those represented groups, which had been developed in the third stage of development, were now compromised; they began to break down. Increasingly, the state became disconnected from society. At the same time, civil society was becoming more diverse, autonomous and demanding. The 1980s was a period of democratization away from military dictatorships in the Southern Cone and exclusionary, elite-based, power-sharing arrangements in the Andean region, and towards a more democratic model of government; civil society played a highly visible and supporting role alongside politicians. The neoliberal era also affected the United States. The expansion of the state and social security provision in the 1960s became increasingly costly during the 1970s. The monetarist perspective which rejected Keynesianism became center-stage with the election of Reagan in 1980. Meanwhile, the United States was undergoing a period of political renewal following public disenchantment with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal; in a sense, the United States was embarking on a new path in the early 1980s, at the same time as Latin America. But whereas the situation became grimmer in South America, in the United States the result was economic growth. DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL REGIMES WITHIN HISTORICAL ERAS Although we identify four broad eras of political development across the Americas, we do not assume that the political or economic developments within these eras were pre-determined. There was no necessary reason why the Chilean military regime went to an extreme with neoliberal economics while the Brazilian one stuck with the statist model, for example. The leaders within each country had a considerable range of choices available to them, and some chose better than others. The four historical eras describe structural challenges that leaders had to confront or that they ignored at their peril. But there is no “Iron Law of History” that determines what they will do. What distinguishes the political regimes from the broader historical eras? Simply put, the historical eras are determined by structural factors, while the political regimes respond to what political scientists call “agency,” that is, to the conscious decisions and actions of leaders and citizens. In explaining the rise and fall of political regimes, historians necessarily focus on particular actors, whether individuals or groups, who seek to acquire power and wield

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it. Of course, these actors operate within the backdrop of a wider framework of relatively stable social and economic forces. Table 3.1 summarizes our model of the political regimes in each of the eight American republics over the entire span of history since independence. Although the terminology used to describe them sometimes differs, these regimes are generally recognized by the historians writing about each society, regardless of whether they like them or not. Where possible we have used names for the regimes that are commonly used by the historians of the countries. But when a commonly accepted name is lacking, we have invented one. Table 3.1 also lists the key presidents, and other leaders, who were responsible for defining the political regimes. Often, historians refer to the regimes by the name of a key leader, usually a president, such as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Getúlio Vargas, Juan Perón or Porfirio Díaz. But even regimes that are usually referred to in other ways, such as the New Deal in the United States or the military dictatorship in Chile, are often clearly identified with a specific leader. In deciding which United States presidents to include in the table, we have relied mostly on the work of Skowronek (1993), confirmed by the results of our tally of citations in the indexes of leading textbooks (see the previous chapter). For the Latin American countries, we did our own tally of citations in the indexes of four leading histories of Latin America (see the previous chapter). The tally included political leaders whether they held the presidency of a country or not. In each of the countries, we found a succession of political regimes. The average length of the political regimes demarcated here is 24.1 years, which corresponds to the time period typically found in studies of historical generations (Howe and Strauss 1991). The median and mode are both 20 years. The variation, however, is greater than that usually found in generational studies, with a standard deviation of 13.8 years. The period in Mexico known as “The Revolution,” which lasted for only 10 years, and was followed by a 13-year interregnum known as “The Maximato” and then a 53-year period of “OneParty Dominance.” Other exceptionally short periods are the period of “Reestablishing Democracy” in Brazil, the “Dirty War” in Argentina, and “Military Defeat and Reconstruction” in Peru. Exceptionally long political regimes include “The Empire: Part Two,” 58 years, and “The First Republic,” 41 years, in Brazil. Some of the regime changes were sharp and dramatic, with an abrupt change in a wide range of policies and practices. This was particularly the case when they were marked by violence, such as the Mexican Revolution in 1910 or the coup d’état in Chile in 1973. Other demarcations between regimes are less obvious, such as dividing the Brazilian Empire into two regimes or drawing a line between “Re-establishing Democracy” and “Social

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Table 3.1. Historical Eras, Political Regimes and Outstanding Leaders in Eight American Republics Political Regimes

Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office)

The United States

Independence and Its Aftermath The New Republic 1787–1800

George Washington (1789–1797) National Consolidation

Jeffersonian 1800–1828

Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809)

Jacksonian 1828–1860

Andrew Jackson (1829–1837)

The Civil War 1861–1865

Abraham Lincoln (1861–1865) State Development

Reconstruction and the Gilded Age 1865–1896 The Progressive Regime 1897–1932

William McKinley (1897–1901) Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921)

The New Deal Regime 1932–1980

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–1945) Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963–1969) Neoliberal Globalization

The Reagan Regime 1980–2008

Ronald Reagan (1981–1989)

The Millennial Regime (arguable) Barack Obama (2009–2017) 2008–Present

Brazil

Independence and Its Aftermath The Empire: Part One 1814–1831

Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil (1822–1831) José Bonifácio de Andrada (secretary of state) National Consolidation

The Empire: Part Two 1831–1889

Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil (1831–1889)

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38 Political Regimes

Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office)

The First Republic 1889–1930

Floriano Peixoto (1891–1894) Prudente de Morais (1894–1898) Nilo Peçanha (1909–1910) State Development

Vargas and the Estado Novo 1930–1946

Getúlio Vargas (1930–1945)

The Second Republic 1946–1964

Eurico Dutra (1946–1951) Getúlio Vargas (1951–1954) Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–1961) Jânio Quadros (1961) João Goulart (1961–1964)

The Military Regime 1964–1985

Humberto Castelo Branco (1964–1967) Neoliberal Globalization and After

Re-establishing Democracy 1985–1993

José Sarney (1985–1990) Fernando Collor (1990–1992)

The Real Regime 1993–2014

Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003) Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2011)

Judicial Offensive and Regime Paralysis 2014–Present

Mexico

Independence and Its Aftermath Chaos and Caudillos 1810–1855

Augustín de Iturbide, Emperor (1821–1823) Vicente Guerrero (1829) Antonio López de Santa Anna (1833, 1834–1835, 1839, 1841–1842, 1843, 1844, 1847, 1853–1855) National Consolidation

Liberal Reform 1855–1875

Benito Juárez (1857–1875)

Porfiriato 1876–1910

Porfirio Díaz (1876, 1877–1880, 1884–1911) Bernardo Reyes (governor of the state of Jalisco) State Development

The Revolution 1910–1920

Francisco Madero (1911–1913) Emiliano Zapata (peasant revolutionary) Venustiano Carranza (1914–1920)

The Maximato 1920–1933

Álvaro Obregón (1920–1924) Plutarco Elías Calles (1924–1928)

Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics Political Regimes

Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office)

One-Party Dominance 1934–1988

Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) Neoliberal Globalization

Transition to Democracy 1988–2000

Carlos Salinas (1988–1994) Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000)

Multi-Party Democracy 2000–Present

Vicente Fox (2000–2006)

Colombia

Independence and Its Aftermath Independence Struggles and Their Aftermath 1810–1830

Simón Bolívar (1819–1830)

National Consolidation Defining Liberals and Conservatives 1830–1849

Francisco Santander (1832–1837)

Liberal Dominance 1849–1885

José López (1849–1853)

Conservative Regeneration 1885–1904

Rafael Núñez (1886–1894)

Peace and Reconciliation 1904–1930

Rafael Reyes (1904–1909) State Development

The Liberal Republic 1930–1946

Alfonso López (1934–1938)

La Violencia 1946–1957

Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (assassinated presidential candidate) Laureano Gómez (1950–1953) Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953–1957)

The National Front 1958–1990

Alberto Lleras (1945–1946, 1958–1962) Neoliberal Globalization

Multi-Party Democracy 1990–Present

César Gaviria (1994–2004) Álvaro Uribe (2002–2010) Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018)

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40 Political Regimes

Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office)

Argentina

Independence and Its Aftermath Chaos and Caudillos 1810–1829

Juan Martín de Pueyrredón (1812) Bernardino Rivadavia (1826–1827)

The Rosas Dictatorship 1829–1853

Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829–1832, 1835–1852) National Consolidation

The Anti-Rosas Coalition 1853–1862

Justo José de Urquiza (1854–1860)

The Golden Age 1862–1916

Bartolomé Mitre (1862–1868) Domingo Sarmiento (1868–1874) Julio Argentino Roca (1880–1886, 1898–1894, 1898–1904) State Development

Radical Hegemony 1916–1929

Hipólito Yrigoyen (1916–1921, 1928–1930)

The Infamous Decade 1930–1943 Perón, His Wives, and His Shadow 1943–1976

Juan Perón (1946–1955, 1973–1974) Eva Perón (first lady)

The Dirty War 1976–1983 Neoliberal Globalization Neoliberal Boom and Bust 1983–2003

Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1989) Carlos Menem (1989–1999)

The Left Turn 2003–2015

Nestor Kirchner (2003–2007) Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015)

Neoliberal Populism 2015–Present

Mauricio Macri (2015–)

Peru

Independence and Its Aftermath Chaos and Caudillos 1827–1843

José de San Martín, Protector of Peru (1821–1822) Simón Bolívar (1824–1827)

Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics Political Regimes

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Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office) National Consolidation

The Age of Guano 1843–1879

Rámon Castilla (1844, 1845–1851, 1855–1862, 1863) Manuel Pardo (1872–1876)

Military Defeat and Reconstruction 1879–1886

Andrés Avelino Cáceres (competing claims)

State Development The Aristocratic Republic 1886–1919

Andrés Avelino Cáceres (1886–1890, 1894–1895)

The Oncenio of Leguía 1919–1930

Augusto B. Leguía y Salcedo (1908–1912, 1919–1930) José Mariátegui (writer and revolutionary)

Apristas vs. Anti-Apristas 1930–1968

Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre (party leader and presidential candidate)

Military Revolution 1968–1980

Juan Velasco (1968–1976) Neoliberal Globalization

Return to Democracy 1980–1990

Fernando Belaúnde (1980–1985)

The Fujimorato 1990–2001

Alberto Fujimori (1990–2000)

Serial Neoliberal Populism 2001–Present

Alejandro Toledo (2001–2006) Alan García (2006–2011) Ollanta Humala (2011–2016)

Venezuela

Independence and Its Aftermath Independence Struggles 1810–1830

Francisco de Miranda, Supreme Chief (1812–1813) Simón Bolívar (1819–1830 as part of Gran Colombia) National Consolidation

The Age of Caudillos 1830–1868

José Antonio Páez (1830–1835)

The Guzmanato 1868–1887

Antonio Guzmán (1870–1877, 1879–1884, 1886–1887)

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Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office) State Development

Restoration and Rehabilitation 1899–1935

Cipriano Castro (1899–1908) Juan Gómez (1908–1913, 1922–1929, 1931–1935)

The Generation of 1928 vs. the Military 1935–1958

Rómulo Betancourt (1845–1948, 1959–1964) Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952–1958)

The Punto Fijo System 1958–1988

Rómulo Betancourt (1845–1948, 1959–1964) Neoliberal Globalization

Neoliberal Stabilization Failure 1989–1998

Rafael Caldera (1994–1999)

The Bolivarian Revolution and the Chavista Regime 1998–2013

Hugo Chávez (1999–2013)

Political and Economic Crisis 2013–Present

Chile

Independence and Its Aftermath Struggle for Independence 1810–1830

Bernardo O’Higgins, Supreme Director (1817–1823) National Consolidation

The Conservative Regime 1830–1851

Diego Portales (statesman and entrepreneur, did not hold office)

Liberal-Conservative Fusion 1851–1891

José Joaquín Pérez (1861–1871) José Manuel Balmaceda (1886–1891)

The Parliamentary Republic 1891–1925

Jorge Montt (1891–1896) State Development

The Presidential Era 1925–1963

Arturo Alessandri (1920–1924, 1925, 1932–1938) Jorge Alessandri (1958–1964)

The Revolution in Liberty 1964–1973

Eduardo Frei (1964–1970) Salvador Allende (1970–1973) Neoliberal Globalization

The Pinochet Regime 1973–1989

Augusto Pinochet (1973–1989)

Historical Eras and Political Regimes in Eight American Republics Political Regimes

Historical Eras and Key Presidencies (years in office)

The Concertación Period 1990–2010

Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) Michelle Bachelet (2006–2010)

Social Challenges to the Neoliberal Model 2010–Present

Michelle Bachelet (2014–2018)

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Democracy with Fiscal Responsibility” in Brazil. These are the more novel aspect of our analysis, and specialists may suggest drawing some of the lines differently. Our reasons for drawing them where we did are explained in the chapters to come. The United States is the only country for which all of the regime changes were demarcated by presidential elections, generally known as “realigning elections” in American historiography (Solomon-Strauss 2011). This record of constitutional regularity is marred, however, by the fact that the long period of national consolidation was cemented by a very bloody civil war. The United States was not the wealthiest of American nations at the time of independence, and its long periods of constitutional stability helped it to become so. Brazil had a long period of stability in the early years of independence, thanks to the weakness of Portugal as a colonial power and the political legitimacy achieved by the retention of the monarchy. One might argue that this was too much stability because the country was slow to incorporate new groups into the political system, especially urban groups that might have brought more economic progress. The adoption of the republican form of government did not help as much as its advocates hoped because of the continued dominance by agrarian elites. The Spanish American republics all had a difficult independence struggle against Spain (and, in Mexico’s case, France), and a very hard time establishing a stable constitutional order after independence was achieved. Many reasons have been given for this, including cultural, religious and economic factors. Our analysis stresses the role of the leaders who were faced with a difficult situation and, in our view, dealt with it badly. We argue, for example, that George Washington and Pedro II deserve considerable credit for the early stability achieved in the United States and in Brazil. Simón Bolivar, José de San Martín and Antonio López de Santa Anna, among others, did not do as well. There were many points where leaders could have made different decisions that would have led to much better outcomes for their countries. Those are the stories to be told in the chapters to come.

Chapter Four

Leadership in the Wars of Independence and Their Aftermath

Independence came to the Americas in stages. The first to gain independence was the United States, during the late eighteenth century. Then in the decade following 1810, with Spain and Portugal weakened by Napoleon’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, independence swept Spanish and Portuguese America to the south. It was led by a number of charismatic individuals. Simón Bolívar and his armies dominated what is now the territory of Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. José de San Martín set out from Buenos Aires to liberate the area now known as Argentina and Chile, with the help of the Chilean patriot Bernardo O’Higgins. There was sustained violence between loyalists and rebels in both the English and Spanish colonies. The transition was much less bitter in Brazil because the independence struggle was co-opted by Portuguese royalty who had relocated to the Brazilian part of their empire when Napoleon occupied Portugal, and who remained loyal to Brazil following their departure. The traditional legitimacy of the empire and popular loyalty to the emperor enabled the Portuguese-speaking colonies to maintain national unity following independence. The thirteen American colonies had pooled their resources in the early 1770s when it became clear that taking the fight to the British separately would result in defeat. The creation of a Continental Congress and Continental Army planted the seeds for future integration. During the 1780s a constitutional convention was established to negotiate the creation and institutionalization of this collective endeavor, resulting in a new country, the United States of America, backed by a bold experiment: a national republic. In Spanish America there was a vision of unity, but it was not realized. The geographical barriers may have been insurmountable for uniting a single 45

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nation from the deserts of Sonora to the glaciers of Patagonia, but unity was not even maintained in Gran Colombia, now split into Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Panama. There was a historic opportunity when Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín met in Guayaquil on July 26, 1822, to discuss the future of South America. But they dropped the ball, each for different reasons. Nor was it clear from the start that the Spanish American countries would adopt the republican format pioneered by the United States. In Europe, the republican form had been used only by city-states. Monarchy was still the dominant political system in Europe at the time, and it was adopted for a short time in Mexico and a long time in Brazil. Even today, there are good reasons to believe that a parliamentary system, such as that which works well in Canada, has significant advantages. But the United States and the Latin American countries settled on the republican system, albeit by different routes and with different problems. THE UNITED STATES The New Republic, 1787–1800 George Washington was a mediocre general; indeed, he was sometimes seen as a man “whose talents were somewhat less than extraordinary” (Schwartz 1983, 19). He was not an original thinker or a powerful orator, and he lacked personal magnetism, although he was tall and a powerful figure physically. Many of his comrades in the leadership of the American Revolution were more brilliant intellectually. But they selected Washington for leadership because they trusted his firm commitment not to become a strong, charismatic leader. After defeating the British, his main priority was to hold the leadership together and maintain a stable political system. Having retired from public life after a military victory that many thought would lead to his claiming a kingship, he was brought back to chair the constitutional convention during the 1780s. Although initially reluctant, his position was helped by his public willingness to mediate between different groups. That position, along with his military record as the victor of the revolution, ensured broad consensus on him when it came to selecting the first president in 1789, a decision that was made by an Electoral College of representatives from the states. As president, Washington continued with his preference for conciliation. His first cabinet consisted of a wide range of individuals with diverse political views. His approach to government was to devolve autonomy to his cabinet members and allow them to press ahead with their policies. The initiatives taken by his cabinet members gave the overall presidency an image of dynamism; but it meant that the president himself adopted a more

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passive position than otherwise appeared. Yet Washington stepped in actively when it was necessary to mediate differences within his government. At this point his military background took over. While prepared to consult and to listen to different points of view, when he made a final decision he expected members of his government to accept it and conform, just as loyal soldiers would. Washington served for two terms, then he set a very important precedent by leaving office at the end of eight years and returning to his farm. This seems normal enough today, because of his precedent, but at the time many people expected Washington to rule for life. His decision reflected his personal modesty and disinclination for the limelight, as well as his principled opposition to authoritarian rule. Political tensions were rising, especially during his second term, but rather than try to impose a solution, he wanted his peers to work things out. There were several difficult issues in the new United States, many of which similarly emerged later in Latin America. First, Washington was strongly supportive of national unity and therefore of a national government. This put him at odds with some in his government and the country who were suspicious of what they perceived as a leviathan. Second was the institutionalization of these political differences into embryonic political parties. Washington was opposed to parties, because he saw them as self-interested factions that undermined the common good. Despite his desire to remain above the fray, Washington’s belief in the need for a strong central government caused him to be associated with one of these factions, the Federalists, over the other, the Democratic-Republicans (Cole 2012, Zagarri 2012). The Federalists and Democratic-Republicans disagreed about the size and role of government, and about some specific policies. In the early to mid1790s the government undertook a series of measures which prompted a split. First, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton established the Bank of the United States in 1790 to assume the public debt. The bank also took over the states’ debts although these were a secondary consideration to foreign debt, the latter to be paid off first. The effect was to ensure a permanent public debt and conflict over that decision. Then in 1794 Washington sent a military force into western Pennsylvania to put down the Whiskey Rebellion, a grassroots protest by the predominately farming community against a tax on distilled spirits imposed by Congress and designed to reduce public debt. Washington received public support from many, but criticism from those who thought the show of force was excessive. Third, the French Revolution had repercussions across the Atlantic. For those around Washington, the American Revolution had ended with the British defeat. They were strongly influenced by the experiences of the Whig movement in England (Schwartz 1983), which had long struggled against the abuse of power by English kings. They wanted a state strong enough to maintain social order, but they

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did not want one that would use its powers to bring about radical social change. Other revolutionary leaders, especially Thomas Jefferson, were inspired by the ideals and early accomplishments of the French Revolution and were more inclined to bring about a social revolution based on popular mobilization around the principle of equality. The tension between a British or French orientation in foreign policy was crystallized in reactions to the 1796 Jay Treaty. Washington had dispatched an envoy to reach agreement over several issues, including British presence in the northwest frontier and its agitation of Native Americans and British constraints on American shipping and on trade in the West Indies. Washington received only limited British recognition of American concerns in the resulting agreement, prompting criticism of the government, which was accused of favoring Britain over France. This split between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, associated with two key leaders, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, was a serious strain for the new republic which had been formed with the idea that the president would be selected by consensus. Jefferson left the cabinet and moved towards opposition to Washington. Washington sought to remain above the conflict, but by the mid-1790s his government was becoming increasing identified as Federalist in character. Burns (1965) observes that in presidential terms Washington’s government was “Hamiltonian”: that is it called for a strong national government which revolved around the figure of the president and which was both pragmatic and an active user of the resources available to it. Following Washington’s departure in 1797, political factionalism intensified and solidified into the two parties, a development that had not been anticipated by the men who wrote the constitution. The country’s second president, John Adams (1797–1801), was a Federalist who sought to continue Washington’s approach by balancing competing interests in both the executive and legislature. But in 1800, the Electoral College (an institution set up to enable the elite to select a president) elected Thomas Jefferson, a Democratic-Republican, who favored a more democratic and limited form of government (Burns 1965). Under Jefferson and his successors, James Madison, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, the political party system was consolidated, in a way that Washington had sought to avoid. Washington and Jefferson were both significant leaders, and both were part of an exceptionally intelligent and well-educated leadership group, the group known collectively as the founding fathers and many of whose writings are collected in the Federalist Papers. They were very skeptical of the role of “factions,” but they learned from experience and accepted the fact that politics came to be organized around political parties. Despite their intellectual differences, they respected each other and valued the integrity of the

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constitutional system they had invented. Perhaps most important, they agreed to settle their differences through the electoral process. Yet their one big schism could not be resolved: slavery, which split the country on north/south lines. Several founding fathers expressed moral opposition to slavery: George Washington called it “repugnant,” Thomas Jefferson called it a “hideous blot” on America, James Madison called it “evil” (Constitutional Rights Foundation n.d.). But all three owned slaves, and the constitutional convention compromised on the issue. There would be no power to abolish the slave trade until 1808, and the northern states agreed to return escaped slaves to their masters. Federal troops were committed to helping suppress “domestic insurrections,” which included slave revolts. Slaves were counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating seats in Congress, although they had no vote, giving more power to their masters. And amending the constitution required a two-thirds vote in Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the states, which gave the slaveowning states the ability to veto any changes that would free the slaves (Finkelman 2015). BRAZIL The Empire: Part One, 1814–1831 In Brazil independence was not the result of revolution as in the case of the United States or Spanish America. Instead it was achieved relatively peacefully. In 1808 the Portuguese royal family fled Lisbon to escape from Napoleon’s invasion. Under escort by its British protector, the prince regent, Dom João, and his family reconstituted their authority in Rio de Janeiro. This was the first and only instance of a European head of state basing their capital in an overseas territory. Dom João remained in Brazil beyond the end of the Napoleonic wars and only returned to Portugal in 1821 when the political situation in Lisbon got out of hand. As king in his own right, he sought to establish a dual monarchy between Portugal and Brazil and placed his son, Dom Pedro I, as regent in Brazil. Pedro I was inclined to be politically authoritarian and perhaps intended to govern Brazil as an absolute monarch. But he was unable to do this because the elite leaders he depended on to run the country wanted a constitutional monarchy at most. Pedro I sought to keep ahead of public opinion, which was becoming increasingly ambivalent on continued ties to Portugal. He was encouraged by his key political advisor, José Bonifácio de Andrada. Andrada was born in Brazil but educated in Portugal, where he taught geology at the University of Coimbra and served as inspector of mines. As a geologist, he is known for discovering four new minerals. He returned to Brazil, then a Portuguese colony, and became an advocate for the abolition of

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slavery. His advocacy got him dismissed from the Constituent Assembly and exiled to France, but he returned to Brazil, where he became a close advisor of Pedro I. In part due to his influence, Pedro I adopted abolitionist views and favored measures to help the poorer classes. This endeared him to liberals, but he also advocated a strong monarchy, which endeared him to the conservatives (Adams 2010, 88). Dom Pedro pre-empted the independence movement by declaring a Brazilian constitutional monarchy in 1822. This decisive move set Brazil on a different path from the rest of the hemisphere, which went through some uncertainty before settling on republics in the American and French model. Opposition was feeble from the Portuguese garrison and its supporters, most of whom were merchants and other local leaders in peripheral states. Independence was largely supported by the military and civilian elites in the core states of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais. The brief war of independence, from 1822 to 1823, was much less costly than those in Spanish America. This helped to establish a tradition of settling disputes between military units as amicably as possible. Brazil benefited from the fact that its mother country, Portugal, was much smaller and weaker than Spain, and very dependent on the British navy. The British wanted to keep Brazil in their economic sphere of interest, but didn’t particularly care about its political ties to Portugal. Pedro I was no political genius. He often seemed cavalier and argumentative and surrounded himself with Portuguese advisors, which alienated him from the local elites (Adams 2010, 90). He sometimes unilaterally ratified treaties without submitting them to the legislature, and he was criticized for an expensive war in the south which he failed to win. The result was that the British intervened to create the nation of Uruguay as a buffer between Brazil and Argentina. He was also criticized for taking on a large debt burden as part of the country’s negotiated autonomy from Portugal. When his father died in Portugal, Pedro tried to advance his daughter’s claim at the expense of his brother. But when that failed to work, in 1832, he abdicated and left Brazil in the hands of his five-year-old son. MEXICO Chaos and Caudillos, 1810–1855 The era of chaos and caudillos in Mexico lasted from the beginning of the War of Independence in 1810 to the start of the Liberal Reform in 1855. A lack of stable leadership during this period established a pattern of violent power struggles between armed groups that persisted for too many years of Mexican history. The Spanish constitution of 1812, put into place by liberals,

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would have facilitated Mexican autonomy or independence, but the Spanish went back on it and kept trying to re-establish their control. The tragic lack of leadership during this period came about because the two outstanding revolutionary leaders, Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos, were killed by the Spanish early in the independence war. Hidalgo was a Catholic priest who mobilized a peasant army against criollos (people of Spanish descent born in the Americas) and peninsulares (Spanish-born) elites. Morelos came from a humble family of mixed indigenous and Spanish descent, and became one of the most effective military leaders in the revolt triggered by Hidalgo. Hidalgo was executed by firing squad in 1811 and Morelos suffered the same fate in 1815. Their martyrdom moved them much too quickly from what Perruci (2004) calls the “superhuman” style of leadership into the category of “meta-human” leadership. They will be forever revered as heroes of Mexican independence, but at the time, the country desperately needed a leader like Bolívar or San Martín to rally the country’s elites around the independence movement and lead the revolutionary armies. With its leadership dispersed and divided, and the country’s land-owning elite still largely loyal to Spain, the revolution was largely suppressed by 1820. Then the liberal movement in Spain again proclaimed a new constitution, known as the Constitution of Cadiz. This frightened the criollo elite in Mexico, who decided that they would be better off establishing their own empire in Mexico rather than relying on Spain. Two leaders, Augustín de Iturbide and Vicente Guerrero, joined forces in 1821 and published the Plan of Iguala, a manifesto that succeeded in uniting all factions including the aristocracy and the clergy, who had previously supported Spanish rule. Iturbide and Guerrero were both from wealthy families, although Guerrero was of mixed African and Indian descent. Iturbide had fought for the Spanish in 1810, but he switched sides in 1821. Guerrero had supported Hidalgo from the start, and had taken over for Morelos after he was executed. With the Mexican independence forces finally united, and questionable support from the mother country, the Spanish viceroy was persuaded to resign, and Spain recognized Mexican independence, at least temporarily. As the head of a victorious revolutionary army, Iturbide was inspired by Napoleon Bonaparte, not George Washington. Instead of retiring to his ranch and turning power over to civilians, he proclaimed himself Emperor of Mexico, copying the ceremony Napoleon had used to proclaim himself Emperor of France. But the other revolutionary leaders, including Vicente Guerrero, were no more ready to be ruled by Iturbide as dictator than the Gran Colombians had been to be ruled by Bolívar (see below). By 1823 Iturbide was run out of the country and the United States of Mexico was established, with a constitution modelled on the neighbor to the north. The 1824 Mexican constitution, drafted by former home rule advocates, recognized the role of the provinces and their rights and introduced republi-

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can institutions into the political system. It was a very reasonable effort, and was accepted by many conservatives who realized that the monarchical system had failed. And Guadalupe Victoria, a general and independence leader, did succeed in completing a full term in office from 1824 to 1829, the only Mexican president to do so in more than thirty years after independence. But Mexican leaders proved unwilling or unable to follow the electoral rules in their own constitution. There were coups and counter-coups, one led by Vicente Guerrero when he lost the 1828 election. He was overthrown by a conservative counter-coup that put Anastasio Bustamente in office. But there was no strong military force supporting the presidency or the federal government as an institution, so the coups and counter-coups continued. Altogether, Mexico had 27 heads of state during the 34 years after 1821 (Meyer and Sherman 1987, Appendix, iii). This included one emperor, numerous presidents and several members of temporary military juntas. The most Machiavellian of these rulers was Antonio López de Santa Anna, a caudillo and landowner who first opposed the revolution, then moved to support it when the Spanish seemed weak. He first supported Iturbide as emperor, then joined the conspiracy to overthrow him. As a general, he led his nation in losing wars against the Comanche, the Texans and the United States. As a politician, Santa Anna was president for eleven non-consecutive terms over 22 years, many for less than a year in length. One historian (Archer 2000, 22) characterized him as “perhaps the principal inhabitant even today of Mexico’s black pantheon of those who failed the nation.” Sadly, his role was so important that this whole era is often called the “Age of Santa Anna.” As if its internal troubles were not bad enough, Mexico was threatened by the United States, which took advantage of its weakness to encroach on its territory (Beezley and Meyer 2000, 2–3). As in much of Spanish America, the Mexican elite was divided over issues such as federalism or centralism, an established church or a secular state, liberalism or conservatism. For that matter, some could not agree on whether Mexico should be independent, or should just seek more autonomy under Spanish rule. And the Spanish themselves were not certain what they wanted, as Spanish politics shifted between liberals and monarchists. Fowler (1998) has noted the relative absence of scholarly attention given to the various political developments in Mexico during the years after independence. Perhaps the politics was just too messy for rational analysis. The period was one in which a series of well-intentioned patriotic citizens made various proposals as a means of mobilizing support, but none mobilized enough support to consolidate their position. These plans were usually named after the city where they were issued, such as the Plan de Agua Prieta, Plan de Ayala, Plan de Ayutla, Plan de Casa Mata, Plan de Guadalupe, and Plan de Iguala. Fowler argues that these plans were too diverse and compli-

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cated to be simplified as merely liberal or conservative. In addition to liberals and conservatives, there were moderates, radicals and Santinistas (followers of Santa Anna). But the problem was not so much the variety of ideologies as the lack of consensus on any nonviolent method for choosing a leader. Armed action became the default way of winning office. This period after independence can be divided into four main stages: hope (1821–1828), disenchantment (1828–1835), profound disillusion (1836–1847), and despair (1847–1855) (Fowler 1998, 5). But all of these stages failed to put a stable regime in place, and we have combined them all into the Regime of Chaos and Caudillos. For the liberals within the Mexican political elite, the period of constitutional innovation in 1824 was the first of three moments during the nineteenth century (the second occurring with the Reforma following civil war in 1867 and the third in the 1890s) in which they sought to establish “constitutional balance” which would bring an end to “anarchy” and despotism. The liberal model was elitist and ambivalent about popular representation, but it did offer an effective separation of powers and a mechanism for choosing office holders nonviolently (Hale 2008, 6–7). But, wide as the support for these goals was, actually making them work proved difficult. GRAN COLOMBIA (INCLUDING COLOMBIA, VENEZUELA, ECUADOR, AND PANAMA) Independence Struggles, 1810–1830 Seeking to take advantage of Napoleon’s occupation of Spain, a Venezuelan Congress led primarily by criollos met in 1811 and boldly declared independence. The most prominent leader of the movement in what is now Venezuela was Francisco de Miranda, whose father was a wealthy merchant from the Canary Islands. An avid enthusiast for revolutions, Miranda participated in the American Revolution and the French Revolution as well as the South American movement for independence. When Venezuela first declared its independence in 1810, the revolutionary junta persuaded Miranda to return to South America and he served as president in 1812–1813. But when the revolutionary forces faltered and the Spanish were about to take control, Miranda tried to escape on a British warship and was betrayed by none other than Simón Bolívar, who turned him over to the Spanish army. Miranda died in prison in Spain a few years later at the age of 66. Meanwhile, Simón Bolívar went on to become the hero of South American independence. Bolívar also came from a wealthy family, and his social status was more secure than Miranda’s because he was of pure Spanish descent. The criollos wanted to be independent of Spain, but weren’t sure they wanted to

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grant equality to the pardos (“brown” people of mixed race), the llaneros (cattle herders of mixed Indian and Spanish descent), or the enslaved people of African descent. The first constitution of Venezuela did abolish slavery, but it reserved political rights to property owners and required all llaneros to carry documents proving they were working on one of the large plantations owned by the criollos. Bolívar’s great strength was as an inspirer of revolutionary soldiers. His troops called him “Iron Ass” because he could cover so many miles on horseback, inspiring them to win battles against larger, better-armed, and better-trained Spanish forces. This despite the fact that he was physically weak, suffering from a chronic illness which was probably tuberculosis. After the dramatic defeat of the Spanish armies at the Battle of Boyacá in 1819 he was heralded as “The Liberator” and many expected him to take absolute power in his own hands. Unfortunately, he welcomed this adulation and gave in to it. Although he claimed to be a republican, he had a paternalistic view of government: he thought his people had suffered too long from ignorance, tyranny, and vice to function as citizens of a democracy. Bolívar had great ambitions for his regime. He wanted all the newly independent former Spanish colonies to unite as one country so as to be strong and achieve internal cooperation. Although his battles against the Spanish armies and the royalists succeeded in liberating Gran Colombia (today’s Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama), there was no effective political structure to take the place of the one that the Spanish empire had provided. Much of Bolívar’s time as a military commander involved returning to different parts of the union to try to keep it together. When he was away, his aide Francisco Santander was often in charge of politics in Bogotá, sometimes formally as acting president. These two comrades in arms developed different approaches to governing. Santander placed greater value on legal and constitutional rule, while Bolívar believed in concentrating power in a single leader. Santander was known as “The Man of the Laws” while Bolívar was heralded as “The Liberator.” Francisco Santander was a jurist by training and a workaholic administrator who spent long hours at his desk trying to run the country. Bolívar hated administrative work and rarely missed an opportunity to take off on a military adventure. Santander was cold-blooded and merciless towards his adversaries, while Bolívar had a sense of chivalry towards those who fought honorably against him. When Bolívar left Santander in charge in Bogotá in 1819, Santander ordered the execution of the Spanish general José María Barreiro and 38 other captured Spanish officers (Arana 2013, 241–243). Barreiro was taken to the main square in chains and shot in the back while Santander watched approvingly from atop his horse. Bolívar was horrified when he heard of it; he had hoped to exchange Barreiro for prisoners held by the Spanish.

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Bolívar resumed active leadership in 1828 and persuaded the legislative assembly to give him dictatorial powers, but he was unable to hold Gran Colombia together. Venezuela and Ecuador split off in 1830, Panama stayed loosely affiliated to Colombia until 1903. As dictator, Bolívar issued decrees on all kinds of topics, including restoring monasteries, re-imposing taxes from the colonial era, giving privileges to the military, and exacting tribute from the Indians. Although his writings had expressed liberal and progressive ideas, Bolívar in power was more of a conservative than a liberal. Some of the young liberals resented his conservatism and attempted to assassinate him in his bedroom. His mistress stalled them while he escaped out of a window. Bolívar was convinced Santander was behind the assassination conspiracy, and historians agree that he probably at least knew about it. He was arrested but Bolívar, true to his magnanimous nature, commuted his death sentence to banishment. Bolívar thought his people needed the firm hand of a strong ruler to set things right, and he thought he was that leader. He and his fellow military commanders thought of civilian governance as more of an administrative than a political task (Lombardi 1982, 128). But, having thrown off the Spanish dictatorship, Gran Colombians were not ready to be ruled by a dictatorfor-life from a central capital. There were strong regional divisions as local strongmen vied for power. Some communities in Gran Colombia expressed their support for Bolívar, but others opposed him, fearing that he would become a dictator. His solution to the inability of the politicians and warlords to agree was to simply declare himself dictator for life. But no matter how much the people had adulated him as a liberator, they were not willing to be ruled by him. Nor was there agreement on anyone else, or on where the center of power should be. So Gran Colombia split into separate nations, none of which really wanted Bolívar for its president. In the part of Gran Colombia now called Colombia, the political class was generally happier when Bolívar’s second-in-command, Francisco Santander, was running things. In part this may be due to the fact that Bolívar was often ill, which meant he was not always able to follow up on his initiatives. This led to Santander’s claim that he was governing “not constitutionally, but capriciously” (Adams 2010, 32). Santander was not so inspiring, but he was a better administrator. Bolívar proposed a constitution with a president-for-life, a structure that critics viewed as a de facto monarchy. It was also a role custom designed for Bolívar, whose life expectancy was far from reassuring. What would happen after he died? The leaders in Bogotá finally pushed Bolívar out after hearing that he was talking with the British and French about imposing a European prince on the country after he died. Simón Bolívar took off to exile in Europe complaining that “all who have served the revolution have plowed the sea.” He died of his illness at the age of 47 in 1830. His proposed constitution died with him. Bolívar was a failure

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as a politician, but a great posthumous success as a national hero. As soon as he was safely dead, he was idolized for his courage, his ideals and his military prowess. ARGENTINA Chaos and Caudillos, 1810–1829 Argentina’s war of independence, from 1810 to 1818, was a bitter struggle due to stubborn resistance from Spanish forces. A strong military leader emerged, General José de San Martín, but he went on to liberate Chile and Peru rather than staying home to provide political leadership for the region that later became Argentina. This left a leadership vacuum in Buenos Aires and the other settlements in the area, and power turned over from one junta to another, with many leaders holding the top office for less than a year. The one who held onto power the longest was Juan Martín de Pueyrredón, who held the title of Supreme Director of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata. He is considered the first Argentine head of state after the formal declaration of independence. A criollo leader who strongly supported independence, he also strongly supported sending San Martín over the Andes to liberate Chile and Peru. He also endeavored to create an institutional structure for an Argentine government, including a national bank. But his efforts were impeded by revolts by caudillos who opposed a strong central government. San Martín was successful in his military endeavors, and met up with Simón Bolívar in Guayaquil in 1822. At a celebratory banquet, Bolívar toasted “the two greatest men in South America, San Martín and myself.” San Martín declared that “it would have been the height of happiness to end the war of independence on the orders of a general to whom South America owes its freedom.” But the two of them met privately and were unable to agree on a working relationship. Bolívar later described San Martín as “a man of extreme fickleness of principle and full of childish vanity” (Eakin 2007, 188). Similar criticisms have, of course, been made of Simón Bolívar himself. A French officer who published a memoir of his service on Bolívar’s staff observed that “the predominant traits in the character of General Bolívar are ambition, vanity, thirst for absolute undivided power, and profound dissimulation” (Ducoudray 2011, 389). In any event, San Martín announced that he was leaving the leadership of the South American independence struggle in Bolívar’s hands and went into voluntary exile in Paris, where he died. Pressed to explain his desertion of the cause, he could only say, “There is no room in all of Peru for General Bolívar and me” (Arana 2013, 304).

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There was no country of Argentina as such at this time; just a number of states that sometimes formed loose federations. The most important of these state leaders was Bernadino Rivadavia, the strongest figure in the junta that ruled the Buenos Aires area. He was a Unitarian, a political party favoring centralized government in Buenos Aires. There was a long struggle between the Unitarians and the Federalists, who wanted a constitution guaranteeing substantial autonomy to the states. Neither the Unitarians nor the Federalists were eager to turn power over to a charismatic figure such as San Martín who might have found a way to resolve the conflict (Hedges 2011, 5). The Buenos Aires junta appointed Bernardino Rivadavia as the first president of United Provinces of Rio de la Plata, later known as Argentina. Lacking an adequate financial basis, because of Federalist resistance to paying taxes to a government in Buenos Aires, Rivadavia obtained a loan from the London-based Barings Bank in 1824 to finance a national bank and assist government spending. This contributed to the country’s first debt crisis owing to difficulties in repayment. In 1826 he introduced a law which sought to increase settlement and economic output by leasing public lands to agricultural producers; it was hoped this would enable greater revenue to repay the debt. Although the law did not increase income significantly, it did lead to an agricultural sector that was dominated by landowners at the expense of smaller farmers (Hedges 2011, 6–7). There was a lot of nation building to be done, a lot of infrastructure that needed to be created. But the character of Argentine society worked against aspirations for a government capable of leading a modernizing effort. Dayto-day life outside the capital city was often chaotic and violent. The writ of the government barely extended beyond Buenos Aires and individual landlords rose up to become powerful caudillos, exploiting their personalistic links with small farmers and the poor to create their own personal militias to further their own positions in the provinces. The Rosas Dictatorship, 1829–1853 The chaos in Argentina continued throughout the 1820s until one caudillo, Juan Manuel de Rosas, rose above all others, to wrestle national control. Chaos came to an end, but at a price: Rosas imposed a regime of fear by imposing his personal domination on the conflicting provinces (Lynch 1981). Oddly enough, Rosas’ charismatic personality made a positive impression on Charles Darwin, who met him in 1831 on his historic voyage of the Beagle. Darwin thought that Rosas was “a man of extraordinary character, and he is the predominant influence in the country, which it seems probable he will use to its prosperity and advancement” (Darwin 1913, 75). Darwin was a biologist, not a social scientist, but he was self-critical enough to add a footnote, in 1845, that “this prophecy has turned out entirely and miserably wrong.”

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Perhaps Rosas’ strongest legacy was the idea that power should be vested in an individual, not in an institution. The legislature of Buenos Aires province was explicit in adhering to this principle, granting him extraordinary powers, which meant he could do whatever he wanted, including imposing the death penalty on anyone he disliked. Throat slitting and beheading were the favored methods of execution under Rosas. At the height of the terror, Buenos Aires residents often awoke to find headless bodies floating in the streams near their homes. This was a deliberate political tactic. The populace did not challenge this directly, nor did the media; indeed, one newspaper reporter observed that order and security were best guaranteed “by the character of our worthy governor; that is where we will find all the guarantees which good citizens can desire” (Lynch 1981, 12). Rosas thought the country was not ready for a constitution; it could only be ruled by a personal autocracy. Rosas was a wealthy rancher and governor of Buenos Aires, and very much a member of the elite, but he cultivated a populist political style by affecting the dress and language of an Argentine cowboy. His army was made up primarily of men from the lower classes whose loyalty to him was personal. He used this army to defend the interests of the upper classes. In terms of party affiliation, he was a Federalist and he adopted the slogan “Long Live the Argentine Federation. Death to the Savage Unitarians.” This slogan was typed at the top of every government document and all government employees had to wear it on their lapel. Yet his actual policies were more Unitarian in that he united the country under the dominance of Buenos Aires, his power base, and at one time he denied that he had ever really been a Federalist. This cynical use of ideologies has also been a part of Rosas’ legacy to Argentina. The Achilles heel that ended Rosas’ political regime was that there was no mechanism for passing leadership on to anyone else. Rosas frequently asked the legislature to relieve him of his duties, but he seemed to really want them to grovel before him and beg him to stay. Which they always did, the better to keep their heads attached. Eventually he got old and tired, but he never actually retired and was finally overthrown by another caudillo, Justo José de Urquiza of the province of Entre Rios, who put together a coalition of several provincial armies in alliance with Brazilian forces. Rosas was defeated in the battle of Caseros in 1852. PERU Chaos and Caudillos, 1827–1843 Peru got off to a questionable start as an independent republic because the top leaders of its independence movement were not Peruvian, either by birth

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or by choice. Neither of them stayed in Peru for long. This is not because Peru was a peripheral country; it was the center of the Spanish Empire in South America for 300 years, and would have been the logical location for the capital city of a Republic of South America. But no strong, charismatic independence leader emerged in Peru, and no such unified republic ever developed. Peru’s independence heroes were an Argentine, José de San Martín, and a Venezuelan, Simón Bolívar. They were very successful military commanders, but unsuccessful politicians both in Peru and in their own countries. After destroying the infrastructure of the Spanish empire, they largely left Peru to its own devices. San Martín is listed as Peru’s first president, although his title was actually Protector of Peru. He protected it only from July 28, 1821, to September 20, 1822, when he left for points south. Simón Bolívar was elected president by the Congress in 1824 and held the post until 1827, but he was more preoccupied with affairs in Colombia and Upper Peru (now his namesake country of Bolivia). When Bolívar departed in 1827, liberals organized by General Andrés Santa Cruz engineered a revolt which was joined by the leaders of the troops Bolívar had left in charge. The liberals put General José de la Mar in the presidency with a new constitution designed to give him more power. They aspired to march on Bolívar in Colombia, but the opening battle failed and de la Mar was overthrown by General Augustín Gamarra, Peru’s first mestizo (mixed-race) president, who wanted to march on La Paz in Upper Peru. A campaign to unite Peru and Bolivia failed, in part due to opposition from Argentina and Chile, in part because of an inability to agree on whether it should be a confederation or a unified country. Augustín Gamarra was killed by Bolivian forces in 1841. After the death of Gamarra, Manuel Ignacio Vivanco seized power and ruled as a conservative dictator for a year, ignoring the 1839 constitution. Vivanco was a military leader from the Lima elite, who thought only a strong authoritarian government could revive Peru, and was quick to send any who disagreed to the firing squad. He called himself “The Regenerator” and promised to institute radical reforms to modernize the country. But his extremism created too many enemies and he was overthrown by Constitutionalist forces led by Domingo Nieto and Ramon Castilla. Why did so many Peruvian leaders fail in the post-independence period? Historian Frederick Pike (1967, 90) argues that “many of Peru’s caudillos, representing the force of militarism, did not disgrace themselves in the early republican period; many of them served their country with greater distinction than its civilian leaders. This may be one reason why militarism has survived as a strong and widely-respected tradition in Peru.” They may not have disgraced themselves as individuals, but they did not work together as a team to build a stable system. They believed that the country needed a powerful

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leader, and they each fought to be that leader. But none of them was able to consolidate power long enough to stabilize the system. Philosophically, there were debates between liberals and conservatives as elsewhere in Latin America at the time (Jorrín and Martz 1970). The liberal priest Francisco Vigil was especially influential for his defense of political liberty and anti-clericalism. But neither the liberals nor the conservatives had the resources or abilities to consolidate a stable regime. It was easier to marshal the resources to overthrow a government than to mount one capable of wielding effective authority. Throughout this period the leaders kept changing the constitutional structure itself in the hopes of establishing a stable regime. CHILE Struggle for Independence, 1810–1830 Bernardo O’Higgins, the liberator of Chile, experienced a fate similar to that of Simón Bolívar. O’Higgins ruled the country as supreme director from 1817 to 1823. His rise was fortuitous, due to his being associated with the right men at the right time. The illegitimate son of a former Irish-born viceroy of Peru, O’Higgins had returned to Chile upon his father’s death, where he had inherited a large estate in the south of the country. Following the Spanish king’s imprisonment by Napoleon and the example of the Buenos Aires junta, in 1810 Chile had established its own government. O’Higgins became a member of congress, although he was considered to be an outsider, on account of neither being a part of the landed elite nor a native-born Chilean. In the civil war that broke out between royalists and patriots, O’Higgins joined with the patriots and leader of the landowners, Miguel Carrera. He eventually succeeded Carrera as leader of the patriot army, but after their defeat by the Spanish in Rancagua, he fled across the Andes to what is now Argentina. There he became close to Governor José de San Martín and as one of his generals led an expedition back to Chile, eventually defeating the royalists at Chacabuco in 1817 and retaking Santiago (Sepulveda 2008). San Martín was invited to take up the leadership of the country, but his rejection opened the way for O’Higgins to do so. Although he ordered that “non-patriots” not be challenged while confiscating royal property, reprisals against Spanish supporters did take place, contributing to deep-rooted opposition by sections of the elite against O’Higgins (Adams 2010, 69). He designed a constitution in 1818 to institutionalize his rule, but there was strong resistance from the upper classes and O’Higgins never established the kind of dictatorship Rosas established in Argentina. He was too liberal for the Catholic Church, but too authoritarian for the liberals. In addition, despite his public works, especially in education and health, he was implicat-

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ed in the killings of Carrera’s brothers and their ally. He was never able to take control of the turbulent nature of Chilean politics (Adams 2010, 71). His devotion to San Martín also meant that he spent a great deal of capital on building a navy for the Argentines to launch an invasion of Spanish-held Peru (Sepulveda 2008). Finally army units forced him into exile in 1823 and there was a period of instability until the conservatives managed to defeat the liberal armies and take control. CONCLUSION The United States stepped into uncharted territory with the decision to create a republic with a president as chief executive. There was no real precedent; the Roman republic and other European republics were all city-states where leaders could easily interact face to face. When Rome expanded its domains, it became an empire, and the British Empire also relied on a monarchy to hold its vast domains together. The American revolutionaries were also intimately familiar with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England and inspired by the ideas of the English Whig Party. They believed that the British monarchists and the Church of England were conspiring against them, and they did not want to replace a foreign oppressor with a domestic one. At the same time, they wanted to maintain social order and protect private property. So they experimented by creating a nation-wide federal republic with an elected president as chief executive. The president was not expected to be a dominating figure in the political system. Constitutionally, he was expected to share power with the other branches of government, including Congress, which was to represent the people. The American experiment worked because its leaders made it work, not because the design was so much better. The single most fortunate decision was the selection of George Washington as general of the revolutionary army, and later as the first president of the United States. He was a charismatic figure, a head taller than most of the founding fathers with a powerful physique and an imposing presence, and he often displayed these traits when he appeared in towns and villages on a magnificent white horse. The people lionized him and were more than willing to anoint him to any post he might accept. He was eulogized by Henry Lee as “first in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” And he was. But somehow Washington did not let this go to his head. He chose not to use his charisma to dominate the new government. It was as if he had read group dynamics texts that had not yet been written and knew that the formative leader had to step back to permit the group to progress. The storming stage was short because Washington was still close by on his estate. So the

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founding fathers debated ideas and proposals for constitutional provisions, not who would take power. This history compares very favorably with the outcome of many historic revolutions, such as those in France and Russia. Washington accepted the presidency after the unanimous vote of the Electoral College, and he accepted reappointment to a second term. After that he retired, setting a crucial precedent that was not written into the constitution, but was respected until World War II. During his presidency he continued to encourage consensus building by balancing interests and factions. He went along with developments that he did not really like such as the organization of political parties. He very much respected the other revolutionary leaders, many of whom were more brilliant intellectually than he. He encouraged everyone to play by the rules and work things out. As a result, the founding of the American republic was very much a collective accomplishment. Washington was certainly a transformational president, relying on his personal charisma with the masses and on a strong commitment to Whig ideological principles. But he was a first among equals. The whole group of founding fathers were a transformational collective, creating and then transforming the regime. John Adams, the president after Washington, was clearly a consolidating (or articulative) leader. But the most important thing was the way the whole group of founding fathers served as a collective, building and then consolidating the new regime. The key leaders of the group, including Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, had serious differences in their ideas, but they settled them peacefully. Brazil also had a relatively smooth transition because independence was not achieved primarily through war but by elite cooperation and consensus, a trait sorely lacking in Spanish America. This was facilitated by amicable treatment from the Portuguese royal family, whose loyalty seemed divided between Brazil and Portugal itself. There were real governance problems, but no one seemed in a hurry to solve them. Economic and social ties between the Brazilian states were weak, each was oriented primarily toward trade with Europe. The arrival of the royal family had helped consolidate the relationship between the center and the periphery, but only to a degree. Independence had a centripetal effect as elites in the far north and south saw an opportunity to acquire greater autonomy for themselves and their region. The national government may have been weak, but Portuguese America never split into a multitude of different countries, as Spanish America did. The unifying symbolic presence of the monarchy was very important in maintaining Brazilian unity. The elites knew the people were loyal to the emperor and counted on that to maintain social order. They feared that civil war between regions or factions could provide an opening for slave revolts.

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But stability of the social order meant that there was little pressure for social or political modernization or economic development. The leadership elites, both civilian and military, built a tradition of working together and finding solutions to problems. Often the solution was to leave things more or less as they were. Pedro I did not have to be a political genius; the country seemed to do better when he left day-to-day governance to aides such as José Bonifácio de Andrada. When Pedro I decided to return to Portugal, the fact that he left his five-year-old son nominally in charge makes it obvious that real governance was in the hands of advisors. As in the United States, the system matured when the top leader stepped back and encouraged others to work out their differences. Many reasons have been suggested for why the transition to independence was much more difficult in Spanish America than in the United States or in Brazil. There were significant elements within the newly independent countries that favored the continuation of monarchical rule, but there was no monarch with traditional legitimacy and no agreement could be reached about who should be the monarch. In Max Weber’s terminology, the legitimacy of the monarchy depended on tradition, not charisma or rational legalism. Monarchy worked in Brazil because of the continuity with the Portuguese royalty gave it traditional legitimacy. British rule had been less oppressive than Spanish rule, but the United States did not have much interest in creating a native monarchy. The Tories who really missed British traditions had the option of moving to Canada. The thirteen colonies had mostly been founded by those escaping religious persecution to found societies where they could escape repression. The governments of the individual colonies continued to handle practical affairs after independence. As a result, there was less need for national leaders to impose themselves on society; when they did so, as Washington chose to do in response to the Whiskey Rebellion, he was on the receiving end of considerable criticism. Even when a republic was adopted in Spanish America, Latin American leaders were prone to ruling like monarchs, although they lacked traditional legitimacy for doing so. This culture had been entrenched under a Spanish colonization that was harsh and exploitative. The mercantilist economy depended on forced labor and the extraction of raw materials. Such a system required a strong form of hierarchical organization from the landlord to the peasant. It called for a supreme leader, but the countries fell into chaos and disorder because the elites could not agree over who that supreme leader should be. Class and ethnic differences were especially acute in many Spanish American countries. Spanish Catholic culture was more authoritarian than English Protestant culture. Spanish Americans were more likely to read French than English, and may have found French history more inspiring than

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British or American. There was little familiarity with Whig ideas about limited government. Simon Bolívar and many others were guided by an ideology of republican imperialism that sought to establish a new empire in America to replace the Spanish Empire (Simon 2012, 280). Latin American culture is more admiring of abstract principles, and less respectful of pragmatic compromise. All these factors seem real and important. We only would add that the Latin Americans did not understand how much the success of the United States after independence was due to a collaborative leadership style that gave top priority to respecting the rules of the game. Even when Spanish Americans copied the legal forms of the United States constitution, they did not always copy the leadership style that made them work. The Spanish American wars of independence were long and bloody and there was no single point of victory over the Spanish. The criollo elite usually managed to paper over its differences under the pressure of war, but their unity did not persist into the post-independence period. The abrupt decline in support for Bolívar and his revolutionary colleagues highlights the fragility of power in a region that had destroyed the old without agreeing on what to put in its place. The Mexican case was particularly tragic because of the deaths of the two outstanding charismatic leaders, Miguel Hidalgo and José Morelos. They became martyrs, but the country needed them alive. Augustin de Iturbide tried to be a transformational leader, publishing a national plan that had widespread support. But then he tried to put his plan into effect by establishing himself as emperor, something the other leaders would not accept. Publishing visionary plans became a national custom, and many of them had good ideas, but no leader could hold power long enough or generate enough consensus to implement them. The figure who ended up in power most of the time was Antonio López de Santa Anna, a Machiavellian whose main priority seemed to be his own glory. Gran Colombia had strong charismatic leadership from Simón Bolívar, as did Argentina from José de San Martín. But San Martín went off to liberate Chile and Peru instead of trying to unite Argentina. It was finally united under a vicious Machiavellian dictator, Juan Manuel de Rosas. Bolívar let the adulation he won with military victories go to his head and tried to become ruler-for-life, but he lacked the repressive apparatus or the will to impose himself as such. Peru and the area now known as Colombia had no charismatic liberation leader of their own; they were liberated by an Argentine and a Venezuelan. Chile had Bernardo O’Higgins for a charismatic hero, even if he did depend on help from San Martín and his Argentina forces. The lack of a charismatic leader, after the war was won, may not have done much harm. In the absence of a charismatic leader, the local elites may have done better in negotiating compromises.

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We are accustomed to thinking of the United States as developed and of Latin America as less developed. But this was not the case during the early period of independence. Nor is it necessarily the case that the republican form of government decided on in Philadelphia in 1789 was a superior form of organization. Canada has done quite well as a parliamentary democracy, as have Australia and New Zealand. India and Nigeria may have problems, but there is no reason to believe they would be better off with republican constitutions. Adopting constitutions modeled on that of the United States did not solve Latin America’s problems. Economic and cultural differences were certainly important; much of Latin America was more like the American South than like the northern and midwestern states. But without discounting the importance of these and many other factors, it is fair to say that superior leadership played an important role in getting the United States off to a better start than its neighbors to the south.

Chapter Five

Presidential Leadership and National Consolidation

National consolidation occurred at different times and in different stages across the Americas, depending largely on how the post-independence struggles were resolved. Building a new nation is a difficult challenge, and not all leaders succeeded. Some seemed to succeed at first, but then the arrangements they put into place proved to be fragile and collapsed a decade or two later. The experiences of the Spanish American republics varied widely, often depending on strongmen who suppressed the conflicts between caudillos for a period of time, only to see their own regimes crumble. This was the case in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and Peru. Stable political systems were established more quickly in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The last two differed from the other former Spanish colonies in their relatively early consolidation of the polity. A key figure in both cases was a strong man who was effective in concentrating and centralizing power. The other Spanish American states had similar figures, but they were less successful. The United States’ success was marred by one foundational issue that had been left unresolved: slavery. The founding fathers hoped that a solution could be worked out by the next generation of leaders, but it took almost a century and a very bloody civil war. Brazil also had an economy dependent on millions of enslaved Africans, perhaps more so than the United States, where slavery was important only in the South. But Brazil achieved abolition without a war under the surprisingly effective leadership of an emperor who assumed power at the age of fifteen and his daughter, who ruled during his extended vacations abroad. But whereas US democracy became consolidated as the “only game in town” after the Civil War, the Brazilian emperor was unable to institutionalize monarchical rule; it never outlasted him. 67

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THE UNITED STATES The Jeffersonian Regime, 1801–1828 The independence regime created by George Washington and the founding fathers came to an end with John Adams’ consolidating presidency. They had succeeded in bringing to life the words of the constitution, establishing a functioning executive within the constraints of congressional democracy (Milkis and Nelson 2012). It was a bold experiment at a time when republics were perceived as inherently unstable, compared to the stability of a hereditary kingship (Zagarri 2012). Washington was the only president of the United States elected by unanimous consent of the Electoral College. That is how he thought it should be: the president should be a consensus figure symbolizing national unity. This can work in a system where the prime minister is the chief executive and the president is a symbolic head of state. But the American founding fathers had not created such a system; they made the president the chief executive with very great powers. There is no way such a president can remain above politics. Washington, and many others, feared that the country could be torn apart by “factions,” that is by groups that advocated for narrow interests or points of view, or even for broader interests such as those of entire social classes. But conflict between interest groups and social classes was inevitable, and politicians organized into political parties to compete for support in winning political offices. By the time Washington left office in 1797, he was identified with the Federalist Party led by Alexander Hamilton, which favored an expansion of national government. The Federalists were opposed by the Democratic-Republicans led by Thomas Jefferson, who wanted a more limited form of government. Partisan politics became increasingly visible during the 1790s and ensured that no future president would ever achieve the degree of transcendence that Washington enjoyed. The second president, John Adams, a Federalist, tried his best to follow Washington’s model of non-partisan leadership, but he was confronted and challenged on a range of different measures, including the Alien and Sedition Acts. He was a disjunctive president, resisting changes that were taking place, trying to sustain a regime that was in decline. The 1800 presidential election was won by Thomas Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence and a highly respected figure. He was a Democratic-Republican slave owner hailing from Virginia, tied to the southern and agrarian interests. Landy and Milkis (2000) cite his victory as a “revolution” since it heralded the start of a political model of the presidency which remained dominant until the Civil War. But it was not a violent revo-

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lution and it did not change the formal constitutional structure. Skowronek (1993, 2011) called it a “regime change,” because Jefferson’s term saw the establishment of a new constellation of political forces within a stable constitutional framework. He was America’s first reconstructive president, claiming to be reclaiming the true values of the revolution rather than starting something new. With this as a precedent, periodic shifts in the regime through realigning elections have become an essential feature of the American political system, allowing the country to maintain legal continuity and constitutional stability while shifting the actual balance of forces and policies. Burns (1965) describes the regime change brought about by the 1800 election as the establishment of strong presidential government based on majority rule. The new regime recognized and accepted the role of political parties and was more democratic and egalitarian than the Federalist regime based on Washington’s example. A two-party system crystallized because the constitutional structure mandated winner-take-all elections in each electoral district. Parties were a mechanism for factions to join together to win majority votes. This meant recruiting as many voters as possible, which meant expanding the electorate to include less affluent men. The Federalists tended to favor property requirements for the vote in the hope for a more affluent and conservative electorate. The emphasis on democracy and equality was an essential aspect of Jefferson’s political thought and that of the Democratic-Republican Party. Partisan differences did not threaten the fundamental legal institutions of the republic; they provided a mechanism for deciding how those institutions would be used. The Democratic-Republicans thought of the American Revolution as a break with the past ushering in a new era of human relations and progress (Cole 2012). The Federalists thought of it as liberation from English oppression, but were more concerned with fiscal responsibility and social stability. The Federalists tended to represent northern interests, especially merchants, moneylenders, and capitalists, while the Democratic-Republicans became identified with rural farmers and planters, particularly those in the South and on the frontier. Jefferson’s presidency spoke to the latter through the abolition of internal taxes and reduced tariffs (Schlesinger 1922). Jefferson is well known for his strong commitment to his DemocraticRepublican small government principles, but he did not let that keep him from a number of measures that expanded the role of the state. They included the expansion of the standing army and the creation of the US Military Academy at West Point. In addition, Jefferson actively sought the successful purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, adding $15 million to the national debt, and using the federal government to impose an embargo on international trade between 1807 and 1809.

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Jefferson could rationalize these apparently Federalist measures on partisan grounds, or simply because he thought they made good pragmatic sense. Expanding the army allowed him to supplement Federalist officers with Democratic-Republican supporters, encouraging Democratic-Republican sentiment in the emerging officer corps. Acquiring Louisiana and employing the embargo was a means of avoiding conflict with the European powers. Jefferson noted that nearly half of American trade went through New Orleans, making it vital that the city did not fall into enemy hands. At the same time, the turn westward offered an opportunity to shift focus and expand American progress and avoid both the corruption and conflict associated with Europe (during his presidency the British and French were embroiled in constant war) and the need to choose sides—even if Jefferson was acutely aware that the constitution offered no provision for the acquisition of additional territory (McDonald 2012). Despite Jefferson’s philosophical support for limited national government, his presidency was far from passive. Both Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans saw themselves not only as representatives of the people, but also as concerned with educating and elevating them. This was what Schlesinger (1922) identified as an “aristocratic” strain in Jeffersonian democracy. The Democratic-Republicans, who had begun their struggle by opposing the elitism of the Federalists, gradually came to be perceived by many as the establishment themselves. In 1825, the party split into the Democratic Party, which supported Andrew Jackson, and the National Republican Party, which opposed him. The Jacksonian Regime, 1828–1860 The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828, on the Democratic Party banner, is widely considered to have been the next major regime change or realignment of American politics. The period from 1828 to about 1850 is generally known as the “Age of Jackson.” Jackson, who was born on the border of North and South Carolina and moved to Tennessee as an adult, embodied a shift in the locus of power from the eastern cities to the frontier. The theme of the era was rugged individualism, favoring the “common [white] man” over the monied elites. Jackson was suspicious of eastern bankers and vetoed the reauthorization of the Bank of the United States. He supported the Indian Removal Act, forcing several tribes to relocate to Oklahoma to make land available for white settlers. Jackson embodied many changes that were due to demographic shifts and were already changing political life before he became president. He was an incredibly divisive character in his own day and still is. Historians have been unable to agree whether Jackson was a visionary who ushered the United States into a more democratic age or whether he was a vindictive and self-

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serving individual who indulged his own interests and proclivities (Warshauer 2009). The generation that led the revolution was gone, but the tone Washington had established persisted for some time. Washington always strove to rise above politics. His successors were partisan, but the norm of civility meant that the arguments were usually gentlemanly. Jackson abandoned this norm; as president he was an obstinate and controversial figure who divided opinions (Adams 2013). Although his political rise was greatly assisted by changes in the nature of the political parties after 1824 and the subsequent foundation of a new party system, these probably owed more to the actions of others rather than Jackson himself. Indeed, Schlesinger (1922, 200–201) has argued that: Jackson himself was a product, rather the creator, of the new democratic spirit, for he rode into power on a tide of forces that had been gathering strength for more than a decade and which he had done little or nothing to bring about. It will appear that the new democracy was “Jacksonian” only to the extent that Jackson stamped the political phase of the movement with the imprint of his personality, lending it certain picturesque characteristics and dramatic qualities.

Cunliffe (1968) has argued that Jackson did not constitute a break with the past in terms of political philosophy. Many of his political views did not deviate significantly from the Jeffersonian model of the presidency which persisted until 1861 (Burns 1965). He supported the idea of limited government and states’ rights. Yet like Jefferson he was willing to exploit his powers actively: he vetoed construction of the national road between Lexington and Maysville, Kentucky. He opposed the renewal of the Second Bank of the United States and allocated revenue from unsold public lands to the states. In addition he forcibly removed Native Americans from US territory while also rewarding supporters with appointments in the federal system in Washington (Merry 2012). The Jackson presidency did mark a change in the nature and role of partisan politics. His Democratic party instigated a nomination and convention system, which democratized the process of candidate selection. This Democratic party was an initially fragile coalition of wider social and economic interests that were gaining strength in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. It was made up of three main groups: free trade–inclined planters on the Atlantic seaboard; northern manufacturers who sought protection for infant domestic industry; and individualistic (and therefore government-skeptic) farmers who were advancing into the new western territory. To these groups an additional component emerged after 1840: the poorer classes of society (Cunliffe 1968, Schlesinger 1922).

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Jackson’s advantage stemmed from the Democratic party being the first of the two main parties to recognize the political appeal of a more democratic posture. In contrast, the Whig opposition (which had absorbed the National Republican Party) mostly represented the financial and manufacturing classes, and was not as strongly organized or as cohesive, at least in the immediate years after 1828. Yet Jackson’s influence in the Democratic party had less to do with him being a party man: he owed his position to his status as a war hero in the war of 1812 (Cunliffe 1968). Following Jackson and his successor, Martin Van Buren, the two-party system between Democrats and Whigs lasted for a further two decades. But it was a party system where the Democrats were stronger than the Whigs. As the anti-Jackson party, the Whigs were a fragile coalition of groups from the North and South: southerners found northern reformers’ commitment to government spending on public works and their anti-slavery views awkward. While the party was able to win at the local level, it was incoherent nationally. The issue of slavery became increasingly visible during the 1840s. The founding fathers had agreed on a compromise to allow slavery in the South, at least temporarily, and limit it in the pro-abolitionist North. As the United States expanded through the Louisiana Territory, the question of whether slavery should be allowed in the newly acquired lands became prominent. The founding fathers had guaranteed the slave states enough voting power to prevent any constitutional changes to abolish slavery. But these provisions would become ineffective if enough new anti-slavery states were added to the nation, making it possible to pass constitutional amendments against the opposition of the slave states. In 1820 a compromise was reached which restricted the spread of slavery to the area below the southern borders of the new slave state of Missouri. At the same time that Missouri entered the Union, a free state from the North, Maine, was also admitted, thereby maintaining a balance between the North and South. This became the practice over subsequent decades, including a further compromise in 1850 following the acquisition of territory won from Mexico. But in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, which effectively lit the fuse for animosity and confrontation between the North and South. These two new territories were located above the established line which divided slave and free states. The act allowed white male settlers in the new territories to decide whether or not they would allow slavery. The act effectively tore up the historic compromise between the North and South as both proslavery and abolitionist settlers flooded into the territories, fighting each other to gain the upper hand and force the new territory towards their preferred path.

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These developments had consequences for the party system. The Democrats remained a strong force although now largely pro-slavery owing to their strong representation in the South. With the Whigs having virtually disappeared, opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act meant that many joined with anti-slavery Democrats to join either the nativist Know-Nothings or a newly formed Republican Party (Green 2011, 12). Among these former-Whigsturned-Republicans was Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois lawyer who had risen to state and national prominence through his debates in the 1858 Senate election. His opponent was Stephen Douglas, the Democratic senator who had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Although Lincoln lost the Senate election, the debates had sharpened the distinction between the pro-slavery and abolitionist sides. Although opposed to any expansion of slavery, Lincoln was considered a moderate at this point. He insisted that his top priority was maintaining the union, not abolishing slavery, which would have been considered an extremist position at the time. As such, he won the presidency on the Republican ticket in 1860. The Republican Party also had a large majority in Congress, the result of steadily growing electoral support at the expense of the Democrats during the late 1850s. While partly a “referendum on slavery,” or at least on the extension of slavery to newly incorporated territory, Lincoln’s Republican victory was as much due to the electorate’s desire to end the corruption and abuse of power of previous Democrats in the White House (Burlingame 2011, 11). But the leaders of the southern states believed that the political tide was against them and decided to declare their secession from the federal union before the forces against them became stronger. They hoped they could wear down northern resistance fairly easily. To win its goal of maintaining the Union, the North had to conquer the South; the South had only to defend its independence. The Civil War, 1861–1865 Lincoln was almost immediately launched into a role as war president. He assembled a cabinet of exceptional men, all of whom were powerful in their own right. Yet Lincoln was able to manage them all, exploiting their talents effectively. Lincoln threw himself single-mindedly into the struggle, concentrating power in the executive branch and becoming personally involved in the planning and organization of maneuvers alongside his generals. He therefore deferred much legislative action to the Republican-controlled Congress, which included homestead laws, the creation of a national banking system, an income tax, and funds for a Pacific railway (Merry 2012). Foreign policy remained almost completely in the hands of his secretary of state (Brinkley and Dyer 2000).

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In his struggle to preserve the Union and bring back the recalcitrant South, Lincoln was prepared to concede on the principle of slavery as an institution, deferring for as long as possible before eventually issuing the Proclamation of Emancipation in 1863, after nearly three years of war. And even this was a wartime measure and only dealt with slaves in rebellious states; it did not abolish slavery in the Union as a whole. For that to happen, Lincoln recognized the need for a constitutional amendment and worked actively with a re-elected Republican Congress to pass it (helped by financial inducements), gaining a two-thirds majority in January 1865. For these actions, Lincoln has gone down in history as the harbinger of freedom, or as Landy and Milkis (2000) put it, delivering the “promise [enshrined] in the declaration of independence.” Yet Lincoln’s deference to the constitution was nuanced. Despite giving it a reverence echoed by previous leaders like Jefferson, he was prepared to manipulate his powers under it as far as they would allow. Burns (1965) has called this a paradox: he usurped the constitution in order to conserve it and the nation. The measures undertaken during the Lincoln years included the suspension of habeas corpus, the closure of newspapers opposed to his government’s policies, placing northern opponents into military prison camps, and conducting military tribunals against civilians without juries (Merry 2012). Yet much of this was a result of wartime necessity and marked no significant change in the character of the government apparatus after the war. Brinkley and Dyer (20000, 201) note that wartime measures did not lead to any permanent change in the size and scope of the institutions surrounding the presidency. Abraham Lincoln is revered as one of America’s great presidents because he mobilized the North to win the Civil War and because he articulated national goals that made the sacrifices of the war seem worthwhile. The stirring words of his address on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863 are carved in stone on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington: “we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” His assassination in 1865, just as the war ended, denied the nation his leadership in putting those ideals into practice. BRAZIL The Empire: Part Two, 1831–1889 In Brazil national consolidation was achieved not by a president, or series of presidents, but by an emperor who reigned for sixty years. His long reign began when he was five years old and his father sailed away to Portugal. This

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seems absurd today, but it was not unprecedented. When Louis XIII of France was dying in 1643, he set up a regency for his five-year-old son, Louis XIV, who end up ruling France for 72 years. The Brazilian elites wanted to have their cake and eat it too, getting the legitimacy of an emperor without actually having to let him govern. Dom Pedro I insisted that his son be properly educated for the job, which he had not been. The young Dom Pedro II was an introverted and highly intelligent child who spent most of his days in study with tutors and seldom played with children other than his sisters. He resented the responsibilities placed upon him, yet he accepted them and prepared diligently. Of course, someone had to run the country while Pedro II grew up. Pedro I’s withdrawal from the scene forced the leaders to move quickly, with the Chamber of Deputies splitting into factions and choosing new regents to run the country. After ten years with a child as emperor, the country tired of this turmoil and crowds of people demonstrated on the streets of Rio de Janeiro demanding that the legislature declare Pedro II an adult on his fifteenth birthday. So they did. Historian Roderick Barman (1999, 74) observed that “the declaration of Pedro’s majority aroused a general euphoria. A feeling of release and renewal united Brazilians. For the first time since the middle of the 1820s the national government at Rio de Janeiro commanded a general acceptance.” Pedro II wasn’t sure what he was doing at first, and he was manipulated by the older men around him. But he was a quick learner and proved surprisingly effective, despite his lack of social graces and his taciturnity. Pedro’s interests were primarily cultural and intellectual. He was a whiz at languages and learned English, French, Spanish, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, Occitan and Tupi, one of the native languages of Brazil. He loved opera and theater and was fascinated with science and inventions. He was also Brazil’s first photographer, setting up a daguerreotype camera in 1840. He maintained an astronomical observatory and physics and chemistry laboratories and a library of 60,000 books. One subject that didn’t really interest him much was politics, perhaps because it had been forced down his throat from the age of five. At first, he took an active role in choosing government ministers and intervening in policy design and implementation. But he found this an unpleasant task because he always had to deal with pressures from factions and interest groups. He ended up suspending the Chamber of Deputies eleven times (Adams 2010, 93). The Brazilian political elite was divided between liberals and conservatives, as in the rest of Latin America. But Pedro II used his moderating powers to balance between the two. Pedro II developed a persona as an impartial figure who sought to provide stability and harmony for the nation. He was careful to operate within the constitutional powers given to him and

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not exceed them. He did so while paying attention to public opinion so as to make sure that he kept political rivals satisfied (Barman 1999, xiii–xiv). As the system stabilized and the legislators and advisors learned to work together, Pedro II accepted limitations on his power. He favored economic and education reforms, but was unable to get them through the legislature. Despite his own opposition to slavery and British naval pressure to end the slave trade, he was only able to oversee a gradual abolition of slavery. Actually, Pedro II left the slavery issue to his advisors and to his daughter, Princess Isabel, who ruled Brazil when he was traveling in the United States and Europe. He was bored with his job as emperor and much more interested in meeting luminaries Alexander Graham Bell, Richard Wagner, Louis Pasteur and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Charles Darwin turned him down. Isabel is sometimes neglected by historians, but she actually ruled the country for three and a half years altogether, during her father’s trips between 1871 and 1888 (Barman 1999, 2). Isabel was one of only nine women to occupy the top political position in their country during the entire nineteenth century. 1 She was technically next in line for the throne, but Pedro II never thought of abdicating and turning power over to her because she was a woman. Perhaps he might have if she had asked him to. But she was no feminist and wanted nothing more than to return to her traditional roles as wife, mother and society hostess. Her advisors resented taking orders from a young woman who had no qualifications other than royal blood. Nevertheless, she managed to sign two very important bills, the first giving freedom to children born to enslaved mothers, the latter abolishing slavery altogether. For this accomplishment she earned the nickname “The Redeemer.” Pedro II himself was known as “The Magnanimous.” Many social and economic changes had taken place gradually during the empire, including the emergence of new urban forces, the diminished importance of slave labor (which contributed to its eventual elimination by decree in 1888), the increased employment of free labor, and an increasingly dynamic agrarian elite centered on the coffee plantations in the south. While control of the legislatures in the monarchical regime alternated between the two main parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, this did not change the top leadership, which stayed with the ageing Pedro II. During the 1880s a more vocal republican movement emerged which saw the old regime as too static, centralized, feudalistic, aristocratic and unable to respond to the emerging dynamism. It never numbered more than around 5,000 activists, but it encourage broader dissatisfaction with the monarchy than in earlier decades (Topik and Levine 1991). The tragedy of Dom Pedro II’s life came about as the result of age. He became stuck in his ways and could not find it in himself to actually retire on his laurels. And laurels were well deserved. He took office at a time of strong

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separatist tensions in the north and south of the country. By the time he was forced to abdicate, the question of Brazilian national identity and the character of the nation were assured. Slavery had been abolished, and economic and social development were underway. There was no crisis that demanded a revolutionary regime change. Nevertheless, a group of civilian republicans and military officers approached the head of the army, Marshall Deodoro da Fonseca, in 1889 to oppose the prime minister. The republicans actually wanted him to replace the monarchy but Deodoro didn’t realize that. He thought the goal was simply to replace the government ministers while leaving the emperor in place. But he was shocked when the monarchy just crumbled. Dom Pedro II just said, well if you want me to go, I’ll go tomorrow. This was a surprise to the majority of Brazilians, because there had been no popular movement to overthrow the empire, nor were there pressures for radical change. The end of the empire did not bring about significant socioeconomic change. It simply changed the legal framework of the government and replaced one elite group with another (Topik and Levine 1991). Pedro II took off for exile in Europe without a pension. He had to rely on charity from his relatives until he could sell some property. Ironically, one of the factors that sealed his fate was having won a very bloody war with Paraguay. Repelling the Paraguayan invasion required building a large standing army, something Brazil had never needed before. Once the war was over, the officers were jealous of their status, pay and prerogatives and didn’t want to cut back. Dom Pedro II didn’t see the need to keep increasing military spending when there was no military threat. Dom Pedro II had done his job so well that it was easy for the soldiers and politicians to visualize a future in which he had no place (Barman 1999, xiv). After he died, the Brazilians felt bad about exiling him and brought his body back for internment in a suitable memorial. The First Republic, 1889–1930 The first republican president, Deodoro da Fonseca, was therefore almost an accidental president. He tried to establish a kind of “guided democracy” run by the military, but he was unsuccessful in getting this regime to work. He relied greatly on his status as the head of the army and as a popular individual who could unite the civilian and military camps. However, he faced considerable difficulties leading a civilian government. His immediate priority had been to defend the prerogatives of the military, but he prompted dissension when he brought former monarchists into his government. Political differences were emerging in the new regime, with Deodoro associated with the financial elite in Rio de Janeiro which had benefited from the monarchy, while the Congress was more linked to the provinces and middle and work-

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ing classes. Although Deodoro had been elected by the provisional assembly, he thought he could run the country like he ran the army, by giving orders and replacing subordinates as well. When his measures generated great resistance, including a railroad strike in 1891, he was forced to resign in favor of his vice president and former army chief of staff, Floriano Peixoto (Hahner 1969, Topik and Levine 1991). Floriano was an army marshal and Paraguayan war veteran and a believer in a strong, disciplined, centralized government. But unlike Deodoro, he came from a political family and understood the constraints of civilian political life. Congress settled down to passing legislation while he set about pulling together the centripetal elements following the overthrow of the monarchy. Among the most serious was growing division within the armed forces, between the army and navy. In addition, there was a civil war in the south between 1893 and 1895 following a rebellion by elites in the state of Santa Catarina and which threatened to bring in external involvement by Argentina and Uruguay (Topik and Levine 1991). Holding Floriano’s government together was a broad coalition, including the large landholders of São Paulo state who wanted both civilian rule and greater autonomy, and including representatives of the urban and middle classes. The broad nature of Floriano’s government provided it with some degree of popularity, thereby discouraging other military officers from overthrowing it (Hahner 1975). The republic had been declared after a military coup that surprised many groups that felt left out. The republic’s first decades were turbulent as insurrections took place among groups that felt they had lost status or benefits, including former supporters of monarchy (e.g., the Boa Vista rebellions of 1892 and 1907 and the 1914 Sedição de Juazeiro) and dissatisfied groups of military officers (including uprisings in the 1890s, 1910 and 1922). There was also opposition from popular groups that had not been included in the old regime but were not satisfied with the changes under the republic. These included peasant mobilizations at Canudos in the north during the 1890s and the Contestado rebellion between 1912 and 1916. Canudos has received particular attention for the establishment of a virtually independent settlement of 25,000 people, which was perceived by the regime as an existential threat following its resistance against several military expeditions. The final decisive expedition in 1897 was extremely violent and bloody. The Contestado pitted settlers against landowners but also included a millenarian religious dimension. Floriano helped consolidate the regime further by handing over power at the end of his term to the republic’s first elected civilian president, São Paulo’s Prudente de Morais, in 1894. Morais, a former governor of São Paulo, weakened the centralized controls put in place by Floriano Peixoto, and paved the way for a long period of dominance of the Brazilian govern-

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ment by the elites of the major states. This is often called the “coffee-withmilk” regime in which power alternated between the oligarchies of the two largest states, Sao Paulo (coffee) and Minas Gerais (cattle). Morais was followed by a series of presidents who worked to consolidate this regime, including Campos Sales, Rodrigues Alves, and Afonso Pena. As it aged, the coffee with milk regime became more and more entrenched and was sustained by presidents who denied the need for change. Presidents who resisted social change and labored to maintain stability included Hermes de Fonseca, Venceslau Brás, Delfim Moreira, Epitácio Pessoa, Artur Bernardes, and Washington Luís. Some of the presidents, however, were able to play a preparative role (Hargrove 1998, 61–67) by creating enough modern infrastructure to allow a more radical change in the 1930s. Perhaps the most influential of these was Nilo Peçanha. Peçanha (Peçanha 1969) was born to a family of wealthy and noble origins that had lost its fortune. He grew up in a small town in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro. His skin color was a bit dark, and he is sometimes referred to as Brazil’s first mulatto president, although his family denied having African blood. Some say that his official photographs were retouched to whiten his skin. He did not hide the fact that he was raised in poverty, saying that as a child he lived on day-old bread and paçoca, flour made with peanuts ground with dried beef. As a law student and young attorney, Peçanha was active in the abolitionist and republican movements. He married a young woman from his hometown who was the daughter of a viscount who was one of the richest men in the region. It was a scandal because she had to escape from home to run off with a “mulatto.” He was a clever political operator who balanced the demands of the federalists, who wanted to give free rein to the state oligarchies, and the positivists, who wanted to modernize and develop the country. He managed to create ministries of agriculture, commerce, and industry and the Indian Protective Service and established technical schools. After his presidential term, Peçanha returned to the Senate and was later elected governor of Rio de Janeiro. He joined with others who hoped to move beyond the coffee-with-milk regime to modernize the country, but prior to 1930 the electoral process was too dominated by corrupt rural machines to permit the amount of change that was needed. The coffee growers prospered and the elites in São Paulo and Minas Gerais, and usually in other states as well, agreed on a candidate who then dominated the elections. Only a small proportion of the population voted in any event, less than 5 percent, due to literacy and property requirements. Local voters were generally guided by local coronais (political bosses) and supported the establishment candidates. The country wasn’t really modernizing in the way the positivists and republicans had hoped.

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What limited these presidents’ capacity to act was the nature of the regime itself. Brazil held regular elections throughout the Old Republic regime, but voting rights were restricted and rural voters were manipulated by political bosses. In addition, as the regime had demonstrated during its first decades, it was prepared to act aggressively against any perceived threat. But other elements were challenging the regime after 1900. The country had opened up in favor of greater migration, particularly from Europe. While some of these new workers had become small farmers, a growing number were finding work in the emerging manufacturing sectors in the urban areas. In addition to the peasant rebellions like the Contestado in the south, urban workers were organizing and demanding higher wages to counter increasing inflation between 1917 and 1919 (Alexander 2003). In response the government joined with employers’ associations and the police and army to attack workers and threaten them with deportation (Maram 1977). Along with this growing social unrest, there was dissatisfaction within the armed forces during the 1920s. In contrast to the 1880s, the military was becoming an increasingly cohesive force, which made greater demands on government for resources. Younger officials were especially active politically, with key rebellions occurring in 1922 and 1924 (Nunn 1972, Aggio, Barbosa and Coelho 2002). The sense that the regime was in malaise was exacerbated when this more organized military began to coordinate its actions with disaffected and excluded social and economic groups. MEXICO Liberal Reform, 1855–1875 Mexico finally found its first great leader in Benito Juárez, a lawyer of Zapotec Indian origin who had served as governor of the state of Oaxaca in the south of Mexico. He would be the reconstructive leader, acting on a strong liberal ideological commitment, to oversee an end to the chaos of the post-independence period, following nearly two decades of conflict against both domestic and foreign rivals. There were many obstacles in Juárez’s path. Approximately 80 percent of the population was Indian or mestizo and had no effective citizenship rights. Much of the land was held by the Catholic Church or by wealthy creoles. But these were old problems. What finally mobilized a real turning point in the political climate, as William Beezley and Michael Meyer (2000, 3) noted, was Mexico’s military defeat to the United States in 1848. This prompted much soul searching and a growing recognition that the country needed to modernize and become more ordered if it was to overcome its apparently innate weakness. The struggle to modernize was led by Mexico’s liberals. In Latin America at the time, “liberalism” meant secularism and modernism,

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while “conservatism” meant traditionalism and the establishment of the Catholic Church. Juárez had gone into exile in 1853 during the period of disorder after the loss of the war. He helped draft the Plan of Ayutla, calling for the overthrow of Santa Anna and the drafting of a new constitution. Santa Anna resigned in disgrace over his military losses and a constitutional convention dominated by the Liberal Party drafted the constitution of 1857 which severely restricted the powers of the Catholic Church. The period of Mexican history beginning with the overthrow of Santa Anna in 1855 is known as La Reforma (The Reform). It was a clear regime change, a change in the constellation of forces and issues that dominated political life. The triumph of Liberal ideas was not uncontested. Conservative bands rose up against the new Liberal constitution, and for a period of time there were competing governments with the Conservatives located in Mexico City and the Liberals in Veracruz, the main port and source of customs revenue. Juárez represented constitutional government, but at a distance from the national capital and often unable to enforce his proclamations. In 1859 and 1861, despite not exercising fully effective power, he issued decrees in favor of federalism, liberalism and separation of church and state. The Conservatives were quite willing to sacrifice Mexican independence if it would reinstate their privileges. After losing their civil war with the Liberals, in 1861, they encouraged the French to invade Mexico, under the pretext of collecting unpaid debts. The French recruited Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria to serve as emperor of Mexico. Ironically, Maximilian was actually a liberal, sharing a political philosophy with Benito Juárez. Maximilian had doubts about taking the job, since Mexico already had a Liberal president. He insisted that the people of Mexico invite him in a referendum. Tragically, he believed the Conservatives when they staged one and said he won overwhelmingly. Juárez mobilized the Mexican armed forces to resist and defeat the French expeditionary forces. Over four years 40,000 Mexicans were killed on both sides (Adams 2010, 109). As the war dragged on, Juárez moved around the country while Maximilian’s 35,000 troops were unable to be everywhere at once. And Maximilian also struggled to manage a country where many of the government officials were Liberals and who sought to undermine him. To appeal to them, he confirmed previous Liberal reforms. This lost him Conservative support while failing to endear him to the liberals, who saw no need for a European monarch (Adams 2010, 111). With the end of the American Civil War, Maximilian offered land to southern slaveholders to move to Mexico, which angered nationalists. Juárez’s armies began to retake territory while royalists abandoned Maximilian and the French troops were recalled to Europe to fight there. Maximilian was captured and executed, an understandable revenge for his order to kill all

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captured Mexican prisoners. With the end of the war, Benito Juárez dominated political life, serving five times as president of Mexico. There was, however, continuing Conservative political resistance. Priests regained the right to vote and the army constituted an important force in Mexican politics (Adams 2010, 113). Major goals achieved by Juárez and the Liberals were the separation of church and state, land reform, education for the poor, tax and tariff reforms, the pursuit of foreign investment, and government investment in public works and infrastructure. Juárez died of natural causes in 1872 and was succeeded legally by the president of the Supreme Court, Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada. The policies known as La Reforma continued under Tejada, accomplishing a significant consolidation of the Mexican state and political system (Meyer and Sherman 1995, 414–15). The Porfiriato, 1876–1910 The next major shift in the Mexican regime came as a result of a leadership struggle. Porfirio Díaz was a general and a liberal and a hero of the wars against the Conservatives and against the French occupation. He said he objected to Benito Juárez’s repeated re-elections and led an uprising in 1871 that was defeated. When, after Juárez’s death, President Lerdo de Tejada started making plans for re-election, Díaz issued the Plan de Tuxtepec, which asserted “no re-election” as a fundamental Liberal principle. In 1876, he defeated government forces in the Battle of Tecoac and in 1877 he was elected president. At the end of his first term, Díaz honored his no-election principle and picked a close companion, Manuel González, to succeed him as president. But Díaz thought that González, once in office, was corrupt and ineffective, so at the end of González’s term, Díaz abandoned the no re-election principle and ran for re-election. Not satisfied with two terms, he served seven terms as president until he was forced from office in 1911. This period of Mexican history is generally known as the Porfiriato, or the regime of Porfirio. The Porfiriato was a period of stability and economic development, guided largely by intellectuals and technicians known as the cientificos (scientific ones). They followed the principles of French philosopher and sociologist Auguste Comte, who advocated “order and progress,” the same slogan that appears on the Brazilian flag. The cientificos were elitists who viewed Mexico’s peasants and Indians as backward groups that should eventually be socialized into European culture. The economic growth during the Porfiriato led to increased inequality and dissatisfaction both among educated middleclass groups and among rural peasants. Meyer (1977, 4–7) notes four main features of the Porfiriato: the elimination of opposition (elections being used as a means of expressing loyalty and

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support to the leader rather than competing with him), centralization of power in the president’s hands (in response to the previous chaos), the creation of a cult of personality around Díaz, and the integration of the political elite into the economic elite. That elite was especially limited in scope; not only were the peasantry and the (few urban) workers denied representation, but similarly the middle class. As a result, a number of the strongest supporters of the revolution that eventually overthrew Díaz would be members of the middle class and professions. Díaz was able to maintain his grip on power as long as he did thanks to the support base which he had established with elite groups. Adams (2010, 114) notes that at the time Juárez became president half of the country’s land was owned by the Catholic Church. His liberal reforms, La Reforma, sought to redistribute the land to its original Indian owners, but by the time he died the best land still belonged to the haciendas (ranches). Under Díaz’s rule large landowners were able to gain even more control and seventeen companies were charted by the president to establish the ownership of land. By 1910 one-third of national land had been surveyed and sold to new and old haciendas. Around five thousand Indian villages had lost their land. In addition, Díaz ended press freedom, jailed dissidents and removed any vestiges of democratic freedom. The effects of his actions undermined his achievements and built up resentment against his regime (Beezley and Meyer 2000, 4). Díaz’s tragedy came in the same way as Dom Pedro II had experienced in Brazil. In 1910 Porfirio Díaz was approaching 80 years of age and becoming senile. In his more lucid moments, he agreed that it was time to retire. In fact, he told an American journalist he was planning to retire at the end of his term in 1910, and everyone expected him to do so. Many expected the presidency to transition to Bernardo Reyes, a general who had been appointed governor of Nuevo Leon by Porfirio Díaz and who had held a number of key appointments in the Porfiriato. He was developing a political base in the middle class and in opposition to the cientifico technocrats. He was seen as a man who could manage the transition. But then Díaz scheduled a huge party, lasting an entire month, to celebrate Mexican independence and his presidencies. Dignitaries came from all over the world and the champagne flowed. His ego was so inflated by the festivities that he went back on his promise to retire. He did not realize that people were not so much celebrating his regime as their relief that it was about to end peacefully. He ran for re-election in 1910 and permitted a challenge by Francisco Madero. Madero was a principled liberal who thought Díaz should retire on his laurels. Madero wanted the country to reassert its principle of no re-election and hold honest elections every four years.

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The official results showed that Madero had lost by a huge margin, but no one believed them. Madero concluded that a nonviolent transition to democracy was impossible and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí calling for revolutionary uprisings on November 20, a date which is now a national holiday. The turnout was actually small and Madero had to retreat to the United States. But discontent spread from the urban middle classes to ranchers and farmers in the north and peasants in the south, groups which had been overlooked in the Porfiriato. Porfirio Díaz ordered the military and police to repress protests and uprisings, but they dragged their feet. They, like everyone else, were waiting for the 80-year-old general to give up the ghost. Finally, Díaz realized his regime was collapsing and went into exile in the United States. Díaz’s departure drew the curtain down on a period of political stability and significant development in Mexico. The violence unleashed by the collapse of the regime lasted from 1910 to 1920 and has come to be known as The Revolution. The clock appeared to have been turned back to the first half of the previous century when the country had fragmented politically and several local and strong political leaders emerged. More than one million people died in this vortex of chaos until the exhausted forces finally agreed on a new constitutional regime. COLOMBIA Defining Liberals and Conservatives, 1830–1849 After Simón Bolívar’s death in 1830, there was a period of uncertainty and for a time the presidency of Colombia was listed as vacant. Finally, in 1832, Congress elected Bolívar’s obvious successor, Francisco de Paula Santander y Omaña. Santander had often served as acting president during Bolívar’s extended travels. He lived until 1840 but neither he nor Bolívar were formally affiliated with any political party. Santander is, however, revered as the ideological founder of the Liberal Party. Bolívar was a national hero and has been claimed by Colombians and Venezuelans of all colors on the political spectrum. Bolívar’s early political thought and much of his rhetoric was liberal, but once he got into power his actions were authoritarian and conservative. The polarity between liberals and conservatives has been a more persistent feature of political culture in Colombia than elsewhere in Latin America. At least at first, this did not reflect a clear ideological difference as much as a struggle between ad hoc coalitions of politicians over the spoils of office (Delpar 1981, x–xi). By the late 1840s these groupings had effectively coalesced into the Liberal and Conservative Parties (Dix 1987, 18). Both groups were sensitive about Colombia’s underdevelopment and aspired to go be-

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yond power struggles between caudillos to build a political system based on higher principles. The Liberals were more inclined to believe that this could be done with secular and modernist ideas, while the Conservatives were more likely to place reliance on traditional Catholic religious values. Colombia’s elite had been generally happier with Santander running things than with Bolívar, and Congress elected him to the presidency in 1832. He had always been more of an administrator than a politician and he worked pragmatically to build the Columbian administrative structures. Colombia is largely mountainous, most roads were little more than footpaths and river transport was rudimentary, so just getting the country organized under a central government was a challenge. In accord with his legalistic principles, Santander left office at the end of his term and turned the presidency over to a winning candidate he had not supported, José Ignacio de Márquez. Márquez continued Santander’s pragmatic approach, but he had to face an armed uprising from a religious group located in a remote community. Fortunately, the country’s mountainous terrain divided the rebellious group as it did everyone else, so the localized fighting did not spread to the country as a whole. By 1842 the central government was reasonably well organized and Colombia’s leadership class could devote more energy to the task of organizing the two main political parties. Liberal Dominance, 1849–1885 In the middle of the century, leadership was passing to a new generation that had been educated in republican schools and exposed to modern ideas. This generation was more sympathetic to the Liberal Party for its emphasis on urban progress and free market innovations. José Lopéz, a military leader who had joined a rebellion against Bolívar, but had been pardoned, was elected president in 1849. He had held a number of posts under Santander, and ran for the presidency as a Liberal with the support of artisan groups, aided greatly by a split in the Conservative Party. Colombia was still largely a rural backwater, and the Liberals wanted to move it into the modern era. Slavery was finally abolished and some elections were opened to women. Direct elections were established, replacing an electoral college system. There was a Conservative uprising against the Liberal reforms, especially abolition, in 1851, but it was quickly suppressed and the Conservatives retreated to lick their wounds. It is notable that in contrast to other Latin American countries at the time, the actions of Colombian caudillos did not lead to the creation of new political parties, but were instead incorporated into the existing ones (Dix 1987, 23). The Liberals were inspired by progressive trends elsewhere the world, including the French Revolution of 1848 and the Liberal Reform in Mexico. The new constitution of 1853 strengthened federalism by providing that local

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officials would be elected rather than appointed by the central government. In 1854, General José Maria Melo, who had led the army in suppressing the 1851 uprising, seized power with the support of a group of artisans who resisted Liberal reforms. But this revolt was also suppressed, and the artisans were forced to march to Panama (which is still not connected to Colombia by road). Melo went on to Nicaragua to fight the American adventurer William Walker, who had taken over that country. The 1857 election was won by the founder of the Conservative Party, Mariano Ospina, thanks to the Liberals splitting behind two candidates. Ospina was best known as a coffee entrepreneur and played an important role in establishing coffee as Colombia’s major product. The conservatives imposed a new constitution in 1858, renaming the country the Granadine Confederation and dividing power into eight supposedly sovereign states. But they also passed a provision in 1859 giving the president the power to remove governors of states and take control of their resources. Liberals rose up in what became the Civil War of 1860–1862. The war ended with a definitive Liberal victory. After victory in 1862, the newly named United States of Colombia was ruled by a series of Liberal presidents until 1886. The most interesting figure was Tomás Mosquera, who had been president from 1845 to 1849 and served three more terms from 1857 to 1861, 1863 to 1864, and 1866 to 1867. Mosquera was a scientist and writer who spoke several languages and published books on philosophy, politics and geography. His jaw had been injured during the war for independence and his speech was marred by a metal prosthesis. He was allied with Conservatives in 1845, but shifted to liberalism and enacted many decrees limiting the power of the Catholic Church, expanding civil liberties, and fighting corruption by his opponents. He became more dictatorial during his fourth term of office, was caught in financial irregularities of his own, and was overthrown by a coalition of constitutionalist military officers and Radical Liberal and Conservative politicians. Mosquera’s successors were also Liberals, but the Liberal Party was split between Radical and Independent factions, and the conservatives found opportunities to take advantage of this situation. The Radical Liberals supported Rafael Nuñez, a conservative, for the presidency in 1876. The conservatives rose up in revolt three months after the election, but were suppressed in some especially bloody fighting. Conservative Regeneration, 1885–1904 The regime change to conservative ascendancy was organized by Rafael Núñez, originally a liberal politician and religious free-thinker who became persuaded that Colombia needed an accommodation with the Catholic Church and a stronger federal government role in the economy. He was

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influenced by positivist thinking as exemplified by the success of the Porfirio Díaz regime in Mexico. The liberals, especially the Radical faction, had a strong philosophical belief in free markets, but Núñez was persuaded that private entrepreneurs in Colombia did not have the resources to take on necessary infrastructure projects, such as railroad lines, water and sewer, telephones, electrification or even to create a satisfactory national banking system. Núñez had been elected president in 1880 as an Independent Liberal, a faction that opposed the more doctrinally pure Radical faction. He won the presidency in 1884 under the banner of the newly organized National Party, which organized an alliance between Independent Liberals and Conservatives under the slogan “Regeneration.” The Radical Liberals viewed him as a traitor, and did their best to block his reforms first through legislative action and then through an uprising known as the Thousand Days War from 1899 to 1902. Between 75,000 and 100,000 people were killed in the violence and the war left the country militarily weakened and unable to defend its territory in Panama, which became independent under United States protection in 1903. The Thousand Days War ended with a peace treaty in 1902, with the Liberals in a weaker position but not completely defeated. At the same time, they had changed their position in relation to federalism, a mainstay of liberalism since the mid-nineteenth century, in favor of greater centralization. Peace and Reconciliation, 1904–1930 The Conservative Party (of which the National Party was effectively a faction) continued to hold office after the Thousand Days War, but the more important change was in the political mood. Civilized debate replaced the virulent and often violent conflict. There was a recognition that neither party could definitively defeat the other, because both had strong bases of support in different parts of the country. Both had become more formal in structure, with clear links beyond Bogotá and the economic and political elite. Patronage ties with local and subordinate members of society were being cultivated, which enabled the two parties to maintain and adapt their hold on the political system into the twentieth century (Delpar 1981, 191). In addition to these internal strengths, there were other reasons why the Liberal-Conservative struggle became more political and less violent. One was the Conservatives’ realization that they needed to adjust their method of government to accommodate Liberal concerns, while the Liberals noted that successive attempts to hold unilateral power had failed. Also, there was a lack of unity within the Conservatives over how to respond to the war and its aftermath (Delpar 1981, 186). Another factor was the faint stirrings of class conflict which frightened a divided elite and encouraged them to close ranks lest this lead to uncontrollable consequences. Finally, the loss of Panama was

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a lesson in what national disunity could bring. In sum then, there was widespread recognition that the country needed a civil working relationship between the two main parties (Delpar 1981, 186; Dix 1987, 25). Coexistence between Liberals and Conservatives was aided by the fact that the federal character of the country’s constitution enabled each party to maintain its local bases of power when it did not control the national government. At the same time, the national government itself was weak from an administrative point of view, leaving the states to manage things. It almost seemed as if the Colombian central government was about to wither away and ensured that conflict was localized rather than national. In this context, the presence of General Rafael Reyes offered a way forward. An advocate of interparty collaboration, Reyes won the presidential election in 1904. He was a Conservative, but he included two Liberals in his cabinet as proof of his bipartisan intentions and reorganized the military as a professional, nonpartisan force instructed by German officers. He also greatly expanded the railroads, arguing that “at present it is the powerful locomotive, flying along the shiny rail, breathing like a volcano, that awakens people to progress, to well-being, and to freedom” (Bushnell 1993, location 2114). As president, Reyes’ policies were often more liberal than conservative, but he continued to be affiliated with the Conservative Party. He was helped in this by the lack of unity among the Conservatives who might have opposed many of his initiatives. When the Congress was slow in implementing his reforms, Reyes replaced it with a National Assembly to write a new constitution. The National Assembly was appointed by local administrators, and it had much more Liberal representation than did the Congress. It passed a rule guaranteeing that the minority party would always have a proportion of the seats in the legislature. Reyes showed signs of wanting to be a presidentfor-life, getting the presidential term extended from six years to ten. But he was forced to step down after only five years because of the outrage over the ratification of the Panama Canal treaty. In negotiating the treaty, he put the national interest ahead of his own career. Reyes’ resignation was followed by two decades of Conservative political control of the federal government, but under a new 1910 constitution which established the principle of minority representation in Congress and other deliberative bodies. The Liberals reconciled themselves to an increased role for the Catholic Church in education and social life, and to a stronger central government. Socialist and labor movements were emerging with the development of the economy, and many Liberals abandoned classical liberal thinking and began to favor the Reyes reforms as a step towards social democracy. The Reyes presidency was transformative in the consensus that it established. By including Liberals in the government, Reyes struck a conciliatory tone and thereby ensured a truce in the national political violence between

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the two parties and maintenance of political order and economic development. In so doing he provided the basis for the continuation of the party system and arguably the model for subsequent alternation of power between the two parties, through the National Front system following a future period of political violence. Despite the looseness of the political labels and the periodic political violence after the mid-nineteenth century, Colombia is arguably the closest country in Latin America to the United States in having an uninterrupted constitutional order and party system, even as the character of the parties has changed in both countries. ARGENTINA The Anti-Rosas Coalition, 1853–1862 By the 1850s, fear and opposition to the dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas had grown within Buenos Aires itself, even among members of the elite who supported his policies of centralizing power in Buenos Aires and restricting the provinces from trading with Europe directly. To get rid of Rosas, his urban opponents formed alliances with caudillos from the provinces and with the Brazilians who were contesting control of the area now known as Uruguay. This strategy finally forced Rosas into exile in 1852. He was bitter, protesting that “it is not the people who have overthrown me. It is the monkeys, the Brazilians,” a racist reference to Brazilians of African descent in the Brazilian army (Lynch, 1981). The anti-Rosas coalition called an assembly and passed a constitution, in 1853, to end the power of provincial caudillos and establish a strong centralized state. Justo José de Urquiza, a provincial governor and leader of the coalition that overthrew Rosas, was elected president. He replaced Rosas’ slogan, “death to the savage Unitarians,” with “death to the opponents of national organization.” But the leaders of Buenos Aires province refused to join the new republic and stayed separate until 1862, when they succeeded in overthrowing Urquiza and taking power for themselves. The Golden Age, 1862–1916 Once they were in power, the leaders from Buenos Aires saw the merit of strengthening the central government, and they also saw that the country needed a more stable political system with elections replacing armed conflict between rivals. With an end to the chaos and anarchy of the earlier period, from 1862 Argentina entered into a relatively more ordered political environment, where elections occurred regularly and power was handed to elected successors, mostly from the provinces—even though elections tended to-

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wards fraud, corruption and the exclusion of many potential voters (Hedges 2011, 21). This period was strongly influenced by a group of intellectuals and activists known as the Generation of 1837. They were motivated by Enlightenment ideas and saw Rosas as standing on the wrong side of the civilizedbarbarian line (Hedges 2011, 9). A leader of this intellectual movement was Domingo Sarmiento, whose novel Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism is a classic of Latin American literature. It is a critical portrait of the Rosas regime, and more generally of the caudillismo of the Argentine pampas. It portrays Rosas as expressing the culture of the gaucho, the horsemen of the Great Plains. While it is true that Rosas manipulated the gauchos politically and used them militarily, Sarmiento exaggerates the contrast between the roughness of the gaucho and the more civilized, cosmopolitan urbanites. Rosas’ regime was very much rooted in Argentine elite politics, even more than in the culture of the plainsmen. The Generation of 1837 wanted to establish a central government that would treat all the provinces equally. However, their perception of who would be involved in the political process was extremely limited. Political office was to be trusted to those most enlightened to manage it while civil rights were more narrowly conceived as economic improvement. They offered Argentina a stable political order and the chance to build the country’s institutions (especially education) and economy. But Argentina was undergoing massive immigration and new social and political groups were emerging. The Generation of 1837 represented Argentina’s traditional liberal and conservative ideas, and they tacitly agreed that the liberals and conservatives should alternate in power. What they were not eager to do was incorporate new groups into the governing elite. As a result, the political elite was culturally conservative and limited to the upper classes, that is, large landowners and those who had commercial and livestock interests (Snow and Manzetti 1993, 13). Bartolomé Mitre, governor of Buenos Aires and leader of the Generation of 1837, was elected president of the unified country in 1862 and set about reviving the economy, building railroads and negotiating with foreign investors. He consolidated a federal army that defeated several recalcitrant caudillo armies and joined with Brazil and Uruguay in fighting and winning a very bloody war with Paraguay. At the the end of his term, Mitre followed constitutional principles and stepped down even though an opponent, the writer Domingo Sarmiento of the province of San Juan, had won. Sarmiento knew that what Argentina needed was to build on the reconstruction of the political regime that Mitre had initiated. However, his personality was combative and this inclined him to act in a heavy-handed fashion, including the imposition of martial law in San Luis province—an act that Mitre criticized as unconstitutional. Adams (2010, 84) notes that Sarmiento’s

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presidency coincided with a shift in the dominant elites, away from the independent caudillos and towards the middle and landowning classes, including merchants and livestock owners. The shift would become complete in the period after the 1870s. Although Mitre had stepped down from the presidency, he could not step away from politics. He challenged the legitimacy of the election of Sarmiento’s successor, Nicolás Avellaneda, and rallied military forces against him. The revolt was suppressed by Avellaneda’s minister of war, Julio Roca, who then took over the leadership of the movement against Avellaneda. The government was further weakened by an economic downturn beginning in 1873. Later in the decade, Roca was to lead a military campaign in the south of the country so as to obtain more land for settlement by pushing the Indians there into reservations or indentured labor. The chief beneficiaries of this process were the already-established large landowners (Hedges 2011, 22–23). Despite the political conflicts and power struggles, the presidencies of Sarmiento, Mitre and Roca are often known in retrospect as Argentina’s “Golden Age.” This was more for economic and social reasons than for political ones. It was a time when more and more of the land was colonized by Europeans, railroads and other infrastructure were developed, and there was impressive urbanization and the beginnings of industrialization. Buenos Aires came to be known as the “Paris of South America” and Argentina was competitive with Canada and Australia in attracting European immigrants. As society become more complex and the caudillo militias were definitively suppressed by federal forces, the politicians began to develop political parties that appealed to people across provincial lines. The dominant party was the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN), which gained power in 1880 under Julio Roca. Roca would remain a significant force in Argentine politics, along with his party, which remained in office until 1916. Manzetti (1993, 26) has noted that the PAN effectively amalgamated a variety of provincial and Buenos Aires–based conservative parties together, resulting in a loose coalition of elite factions. What held it together was its strong patronage ties, especially with provincial caudillos—although as Hedges (2011, 23–24) points out, the basis of their power was economic rather than military. Moreover, that economic power was due to landownership, which provided the basis for Argentina’s integration into the global economy, being based on agricultural exports. During the 1890s the first sign of renewed political instability began to emerge because of the resentment from politically excluded groups. The Argentine political elite was extremely conservative—arguably even reactionary—in its stance towards party politics and exercised influence through patronage. As a result, it showed little inclination to share power or incorpo-

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rate emerging new social groups into the established party system (Manzetti 1993, 78). The exclusionary nature of the PAN resulted in growing opposition. During the 1880s political dissidents formed the Unión Cívica movement (subsequently a political party), which was opposed to government policies and corruption—the latter contributing to an exceptional economic crisis in 1889 followed by armed revolt in 1890. Although the regime was not overthrown, the insurrection had the effect of consolidating the Unión Cívica as the principal opposition party in Argentina. Moreover, in contrast to the PAN, it was more open to different voices, incorporating elements of the newly emerging middle and professional classes among its ranks and eventually within its leadership. Although it advocated revolution, this tendency was to diminish over time, as it sought an electoral route to power (Lewis 2002, 199–200). The Unión Cívica party underwent a split in 1891 when Roca (now interior minister) proposed that former president Mitre run as the unity candidate for the government and opposition Unión Cívica. Those who opposed the Unión Cívica’s acquiescence fragmented, to establish the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). The UCR was eventually led by an especially charismatic politician, Hipólito Yrigoyen. Yrigoyen lost the election to Mitre’s replacement, Luis Sáenz Peña. Julio Roca was a powerful figure throughout this period, often ruling from behind the scenes. He was re-elected in 1898, but fell ill at the end of his second term and died in 1914. While the PAN and UCR became the principal poles of Argentine party politics in the last decade of the nineteenth century, there remained a largely unaccounted section of society. Mass migration during the last quarter of the century had resulted in a growing working class. Although socialists sought to organize them and include them into the party system, anarchism and syndicalism dominated among them (Manzetti 1993, 79–80). This meant efforts by the UCR to tap into their support remained peripheral as well; later this segment of society would become important for providing the basis for more labor-oriented populism under the corporatist model promoted by Juan Perón. Yet at this stage the importance of the working class was still limited. Of greater political importance at the turn of twentieth century was the urban middle class, which felt disenfranchised. In 1910, the presidency was won by Roque Sáenz Peña, the leader of a progressive faction of the PAN. But by now the political system was becoming unpopular, mainly because of the dominance of the PAN, whose support was based on a limited elite rather than broader society (Hedges 2011, 34–35). In 1909 the PAN collapsed, splitting into several different conservative parties in the different provinces.

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PERU The Age of Guano, 1843–1879 In Peru much of the national consolidation occurred under Rámon Castilla, who served as elected president from 1845 to 1851 and again from 1855 to 1862, as well as for interim periods in 1844 and 1863. Castilla was a caudillo with a distinguished record in the War of Independence and in the War of the Confederation (1836–1839), which unsuccessfully defended the union of Peru and Bolivia against Chilean and Argentine forces. Castilla’s leadership skills may have been better than those of the caudillos who came before him, but his success in pulling the country together also benefited greatly from a new economic resource: guano (bird droppings) that was rich in nitrates that could be sold on the world market as fertilizer (Berg and Weaver, 1978). Few Peruvians were willing to take jobs collecting the stinky droppings, mostly on offshore islands, so the government imported Chinese laborers for the task. After winning an election in 1845, Castilla signed an agreement with the British firm Antony Gibbs, which marketed the guano in Europe. This provided a flow of income to the Peruvian government without requiring any changes in the domestic economy, giving Castilla the resources to build a strong national army and federal bureaucracy. These gave him the power to indulge his moral sensibilities, including opposition to slavery and the head tax that had been imposed on the Indians. When he first took office, Castilla’s political style was conciliatory; he brought both liberals and conservatives into his administrations. He was obsessed with maintaining order and harmony, which meant both minimizing ideological conflict and maintaining a strong army. He did not, however, have much respect for the formalities of constitutional rule. He supported José Rufino Echenique to succeed him in 1851, but then found him unsatisfactory and led a coup to overthrow him in 1855. He seized the presidency for a fourth time in 1863 when the elected president died and he did not approve of the constitutional successor. He died in 1867, at the age of 70, while leading a group of followers through the mountains in an attempt to return from exile and seize power for the fifth time. Castilla accomplished a great deal, including liberating Peru’s remaining enslaved people in 1854 and ending the annual tribute Indians had to pay, but he then allowed landowners to bring in Chinese laborers in virtual bondage. The guano income was absorbed by the new government employees and he was unable to raise taxes sufficiently to cover the costs of recompensing the slave owners and meeting other obligations. At the time of his death, Peru was in economic crisis. This was hardly surprising since economic booms based on a single commodity almost always collapse. Income from guano

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was bound to decline as the deposits were depleted, while the economic demands of the bureaucracy and the military increased steadily. Castilla’s rule laid the foundations for Manuel Pardo, who served between 1872 and 1876. Pardo’s rise came about through his opposition to President José Balta’s plan to shore up the export economy through new contracts with French companies that had been negotiated by the finance minister, Nicolás de Piérola. Along with other businessmen, Pardo objected to turning so much of the economy over to foreign interests, and in 1871 they organized the Civilista (Civilianist) Party, which sought more respect for republican institutions, greater local autonomy, less clerical influence in government, more investment in public education, and limits on the military and its budget (Werlich 1978, 95–96). Piérola’s deal with the French was signed, but he failed to restrain government spending and the economic crisis continued. The Civilistas wanted to develop a more diversified economy based on local enterprises and had strong support from the landowning class. Much of the politics of the era was an argument between the Piérolists, who wanted instantaneous social transformation based on guano wealth, and Pardo’s Civilistas, who advocated slower development based on the domestic economy. In 1872 Pardo won a spectacular triumph in the electoral college. Although President José Balta accepted the victory of Pardo and the Civilistas, it was opposed by his war minister, Colonel Tomás Gutiérrez, who imprisoned Balta and declared himself president. The civilians in Lima were outraged, along with army and naval garrisons at Callao. Rioters massacred Gutiérrez and cut out his heart and hung the rest of his body from a cathedral tower. At the same time, Balta was murdered by his guards in prison. The militarism associated with the coup was discredited (Werlich 1978, 96). The election of Manuel Pardo could have been a turning point in Peruvian history. However, Pardo faced difficulties from the outset of his presidency. A global recession forced him to retrench public spending (especially on the military, which was outraged) and raise taxes to increase revenue. At the same time, he was determined not to cut back on public education and the large investments in the transport sector which his predecessor had undertaken. The Piérolistas were outraged when the Pardo government tried to prosecute ministers of the Balta government for responsibility for the country’s economic failures. Piérola himself engineered several barracks uprisings and sought aid from Chile, which had boundary disputes with Peru and Bolivia. Finally, after leaving office on November 16, 1878, Manuel Pardo was assassinated by a sergeant who blamed him for blocking his promotion. Pardo’s supporters blamed the Piérolistas although there was no proof of an organized conspiracy. The experience of the Pardo presidency illustrates the lost opportunity for Peru and the limits that he faced in trying to achieve a major revision of the

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system. The political system in which he operated had been established by Castilla in the 1840s, buttressed as it was with the emergence of the guano trade and its growing revenues for the state. Pardo and his Civilista Party were therefore beneficiaries of this economic good fortune and represented interests from across the political divide, bringing together liberals and conservatives (Werlich 1978). While this incorporated some of the new economic groups emerging in Peru, such as merchants and traders, it was still dominated by the elite, including landlords. It therefore failed to include wider society, especially the indigenous and migrant poor. Military Defeat and Reconstruction, 1879–1886 In 1876, Pardo was replaced as president by Mariano Prado, a former general who had already served a previous term as president between 1865 and 1868. His second term in office was marked by the War of the Pacific, ending in defeat to Chile that swallowed the political careers of many. Prado might have negotiated a settlement with Chile over disputed border territories rich in nitrates. Central to the dispute was control of the guano deposits in the Antofagasta province and rising tensions between Chile and Bolivia over its use. In 1873 Peru and Bolivia had signed a secret defensive alliance, which brought Peru into the conflict between the other two belligerents. Of the three, Peru was the larger country with more resources and a proud history. While diplomats sought a negotiated settlement, Prado’s government made preparations since Peru was not ready for war. Despite the country’s unpreparedness, many Peruvians were confident that in the long run they would prove their strength. Lima had been the center of Spanish colonization on the west coast of South America. Chile was an agricultural backwater in colonial times, producing food for export to Lima. When the war broke out, the Peruvian army had 5,241 men and its Bolivian ally had 2,175; the Chilean army only numbered 2,694 men. When war broke out between Bolivia and Chile, Peru was unable to remain aloof. Prado felt obliged to stand behind Bolivia since he feared being overthrown (Werlich 1978, 112). However, the Peruvians were in for a shock. Despite having fewer troops, the Chileans were better armed, equipped and trained. Also, the Chilean navy was superior, and the Chileans proved adept at amphibious warfare, landing forces at strategic points where it was difficult for the Peruvians to move in sufficient forces to counter them. The Chileans also recruited Chinese laborers who had been held in bondage by Peruvian guano operators. The Peruvian military was no match for the Chileans, and the country fell apart as a result of the ensuing military defeat. Following criticism from Piérola and the opposition in 1879, Prado sought to placate his rival, offering him the finance ministry. But Piérola wanted the presidency and he got it

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following a short revolution after Prado abandoned office for Europe in midDecember. Piérola was unable to better Prado’s military leadership though: in January 1881 Lima was occupied by Chilean troops and Piérola departed into the countryside, promising to continue the fight. But the following month establishment figures in Lima overthrew Piérola and replaced him with Francisco García Calderón as president, a Civilista lawyer, who in turn was deposed by Chile later in the year (Werlich 1978, 115–18). The military leaders blamed the loss of the war on funding cuts during the earlier Manuel Pardo government, but they could not agree on leadership. Finally, a treaty with Chile was signed by three military leaders, each of whom claimed to be the president of Peru but actually controlled only part of the country. Of the three, General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, refused to concede to the Chileans; General Miguel de Iglesias, meanwhile, signed the Treaty of Ancón in October 1883. Of the three, Cáceres was arguably the more charismatic. He was a mestizo: one of his ancestors was a Spanish colonel and another was an Indian princess. He was from Ayacucho, in the Andes Mountains, a town that was the scene of a very bloody battle in the War of Independence. Simón Bolívar gave the town its name, which means “corner of the dead” in Quechua. Cáceres had a military career and participated in the battalion that supported Ramón Castilla against President José Rufino Echenique. He became a war hero, leading Peruvian forces in a border dispute with Ecuador, a conflict with Spain over some islands, and in the War of the Pacific with Chile. Cáceres was known as the “Wizard of the Andes” because of his success in a number of battles and guerrilla struggles with Chilean forces during the War of the Pacific. His army had eventually been defeated but he refused to give up and went into hiding. Between de Iglesias and Cáceres, who commanded parts of Peru during the War of the Pacific, it is the latter who is celebrated as a symbol of nationalist resistance and admired by nationalist groups; the former has been largely overlooked (Werlich 1978, 118–19). VENEZUELA The Age of Caudillos, 1830–1868 The first Venezuelan government, separate from Gran Colombia, was established in January 1830 by one of Bolívar’s generals, the llanero (plainsman) José Antonio Páez. One of the new government’s first acts was to pass a law prohibiting Simón Bolívar from returning to the country. The new government under Páez wrote a new constitution in 1830, following republican principles with indirect elections, while allowing slavery to continue. Páez hoped to build stable institutions for a newly independent country. The constitution he established did not allow him to be president indefinitely, so he

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chose men who would follow his guidance. These presidents sought to articulate the model Páez had established. Politicians split into Liberal and Conservative Parties, groups that had no strong ideological commitments but mostly just competed for power. Páez was a Conservative, but in 1846 he supported a Liberal, General José Tadeo Mongas, as successor to the presidency. But Mongas did not play along with the idea of sharing power and threw the Conservatives out of the government, sending Páez into exile. He became a dictator, alternating power with his brother, José Gregorio Mongas. In 1858, the Liberals and Conservatives could not agree on a replacement for Mongas, and there were twelve years of intermittent civil war with local caudillos asserting independence from the central government. The Guzmanato, 1868–1887 This period of instability finally ended when Liberals under the leadership of General Antonio Guzmán seized power in 1868. Guzmán dominated politics until 1887, again attempting to reconstruct a stable political order. Guzmán was able to suppress the political violence which had plagued Venezuela, but he was either unable or unwilling to incorporate the dominant economic groups in his government. His primary concern was to maintain his prominence in politics rather than establishing a stable civilian regime based on democracy. Some institutional progress was made; it was during this time, in 1879, that a national currency was established for the first time (Grindle 2000, 41). The flaw, as so often in Latin American politics, was that political order depended on loyalty to Guzmán as an individual, rather than commitment to formal constitutional structures or political parties. When his powers began to wane, after 1887, civilian presidents were unable to command enough loyalty to sustain a stable administration. The caudillos who dominated Venezuela for much of the nineteenth century thought of themselves as heroic builders of the nation, in the spirit of Bolívar. This accounts for the practice of passing a new constitution with each major change of leadership. But lasting change came not through new constitutional structures but from the gradual strengthening of the administrative and military capabilities of the central government relative to the regional caudillos. This was facilitated by technological progress that gave the central government an advantage. The telegraph improved communications and railways and highways improved transport, enabling the central government to more effectively intervene in remote regions. Military training was professionalized and the army was provided with the Winchester repeating rifle, increasing its capability to control regional caudillos (Lombardi 1982, 203).

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CHILE The Conservative Regime, 1830–1851 In Chile the post-independence period of chaos came to an end in 1830 with the creation of a conservative coalition that was dominated by one man, Diego Portales. Unlike so many Latin American politicians, Portales cared little for the superficial trappings of office and never ran for president himself. He believed that the Chilean people were not ready for democracy, but he also opposed dominance by a strong leader. He believed in a government of strong institutions, institutions that were stronger than any of the individual leaders. He wanted a “strong centralizing government, whose men will be seen as true models of virtue and patriotism” (Portales 1822). His ideals were consecrated in the constitution of 1833, which remained in force, with amendments, until 1925. Power was centralized in a president who could serve for two five-year terms (until a constitutional amendment ended this in 1871), along with a Congress that had to approve expenditures and a judiciary. Although he believed in institutions, Portales was prepared to act autocratically through the use of fear and repression against the opposition. On the one hand, this prevented Chile collapsing into the anarchy that bedeviled other former Spanish colonies in the Americas during the period (Loveman 1988). On the other hand, the unchecked nature of his power prompted discontent and he was eventually assassinated soon after the start of a foreign war with Peru and Bolivia in June 1837. There was little sympathy for the murdered strongman, although it did encourage public ill feeling towards foreigners; the Bolivian leader Santa Cruz was suspected of being behind the assassination (Galdames 1941). Despite Portales’ death, the conservative regime survived even as wider changes were happening in Chilean society and the economy. By the 1830s Chile’s population had doubled, to a million, although it was the upper classes whose situation had improved most. During the 1840s economic development—especially through coal, agriculture, and trade—contributed to an emerging commercial class. These would eventually coalesce politically into new political movements and groups, including liberals and radicals who would demand a greater say in the political system (Galdames 1941). Liberal-Conservative Fusion, 1851–1891 The moment for Chilean liberals and radicals arrived in 1851. A disputed presidential election led to the arrest of liberal and radical leaders, which escalated into an armed uprising and demand for an expansion of the suffrage. By the end of the year the uprising had been put down, but at the cost

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of 2,000 dead and 1,500 wounded at the Battle of Loncomilla. But what it had established was the existence of two main political parties in Chile: the Conservatives and the Liberals, the latter of which tended to include the smaller, radical grouping (Galdames 1941). Although the opposition had lost the election and uprising, they had made their point. Liberals and Conservatives coexisted for the next few decades. During the 1860s, a Conservative president, José Joaquín Pérez, came to the presidency. He was an elderly patrician whose relaxed political style appealed to both sides. He was elected unopposed when the opposition withdrew from the election; but in return they got constitutional reform in 1863. During this period of Liberal-Conservative fusion (Collier and Sater 2004, 114–20), the leadership class in general recognized the need for modernization, and the constitution was reinterpreted to allow Protestants as well as Catholics to worship. It was a period of ideological harmony and national unity, strengthened by a successful War of the Pacific with Peru and Bolivia that expanded the national territory. That unity ended in the years following the War of the Pacific. The 1880s was a period of flux, politically and economically. The end of the 1870s brought financial difficulties with Chile finding it harder to repay its foreign loans. In the following decade labor emerged as a political force, with the country’s first strikes taking place and the leadership demanding representation in the system, which the parties were ill prepared to provided. Into this mix stepped José Manuel Balmaceda, a Liberal president elected in 1886. He sought wide-ranging reforms, including heavy spending on public works. But there was strong congressional opposition, strengthened by reports of corruption in the increased spending. Balmaceda exacerbated matters by deciding to decree an appropriations bill rather than recall Congress in 1891. The reaction was sharp, with Balmaceda accused of violating the constitution and behaving like a dictator. Conflict broke out with Congress and the navy on one side and Balmaceda and the army on the other. In August 1891 forces loyal to Balmaceda lost the armed struggle, and he took refuge in the Argentine embassy for a period. Seeing no hope for fair treatment, he committed suicide on the day his term in office officially ended. The Parliamentary Republic, 1891–1925 The repercussions of Balmaceda’s fall were constitutionally significant: for the next thirty years Congress became the stronger branch and dominated Chile’s political system, a very unusual pattern for Latin America. The period is generally called the Parliamentary Republic although there was no formal constitutional change. The transition to this era was presided over by Jorge Montt, a vice admiral of the navy who led the civil war against Balma-

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ceda. Montt served as president from 1891 to 1896, and played a conciliatory role, granting amnesty to the leaders of the previous government. The constitution of 1833 already gave great power to Congress, and it used these powers to push the president into almost a figurehead role. Municipalities were also given greater autonomy, further weakening presidential power. This system worked because power was monopolized by a small group that prioritized order and stability over economic development or social change. But even as Congress set the terms of the political system, it faced challenges from below. These would come to the fore by the 1920s–1930s and prompted a return to stronger presidential leadership. CONCLUSION When the era of independence struggles drew to a close, a small elite had asserted control over the national territories of each of our eight republics. The nature of this elite varied, but large landowners and the leaders of regional militias often predominated, along with slave plantation owners and commercial businessmen, together with their supporting lawyers, clerics and military officers. There was wide agreement on the necessity to consolidate national development by building infrastructure such as roads and railroads and telegraph lines and banking systems. There was also a need for more professionalized national armies and civilian government bureaucracies. Less universally recognized was the need to incorporate broader sectors of society into the governing system. The leadership elite in the United States was strongly committed to using regular elections to choose presidents and other officials as specified in the constitution. Although the founding fathers had not anticipated that political parties would be part of the system, they were powerful tools for mobilizing support to win elections. The transformational presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson used the political party system to mobilize wider segments of the white male population, both geographically and in terms of social class. By 1861 almost all white men had the vote. The system failed, however, to incorporate Americans of African descent or to maintain unity between the northern and southern states. The founding fathers’ hope that later generations could resolve the slavery issue was not realized. The abolitionist movement grew stronger and the issue of the status of the newly incorporated western states became critical. When the southerners saw that they would be gradually outvoted as more free states were added to the Union, they seceded, hoping that the North would not sustain the human and financial cost of war. But under Abraham Lincoln’s leadership, the North won the very bloody Civil War, which ended slavery and established the predominance of the national government.

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This did not mean that African Americans would be incorporated as equals, an idea thought of as radical and impractical throughout this era. Jefferson and Jackson could not envisage the Native Americans either as part of the United States. Even Abraham Lincoln did not believe blacks and whites could live together as equals and appeared to support (in principle if not in practice) the notion of black return to Africa. Racist attitudes were not transformed by the northern victory in the Civil War. Presidents Andrew Johnson, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, discussed in the next chapter, were believers in white supremacy. In Brazil, Emperor Pedro II watched over a system of gentlemanly compromise between elites in different states. Slavery was not concentrated in one region to the extent that it was in the United States so it did not lead to a regional polarization. Slavery was gradually abolished by freeing the children of enslaved women and by the British navy, which suppressed the import of new enslaved Africans. The more enlightened members of the Brazilian elite thought slavery was part of the country’s backwardness and that abolition would make the country more attractive to European immigrant labor. This avoided a civil war, but Brazil was the last country in the western world to fully abolish slavery, in 1888. The national government was weak in comparison to the state governments in Brazil, an arrangement that preserved national unity but did not encourage the development of national transportation networks and economic infrastructure or the settlement of the interior of the country. There was significant modernization of infrastructure in the state of São Paulo and some in other southern states, while the northeast lagged behind. Pedro II, although thoroughly modern in his interest in science and global culture, was not in his old age the leader Brazil needed to advance beyond a loose confederation of mostly backward states. He stayed in power too long, out of inertia and lack of a male heir. Brazilians finally turned to republicanism as an alternative. In Spanish America the republican model was broadly accepted in form, but local leaders often challenged the winners of national elections. In Mexico, strong progressive leadership from Benito Juárez, a transformational president guided by liberal ideology, was repeatedly undermined by foreign intervention and by opposition from conservative groups. Nevertheless, the country made considerable progress under Juárez and under Porfirio Díaz, a transformational presidents with a positivist ideology. Díaz, however, stayed in power too long, leading to the tragedy of the revolution. Latin Americans often placed their confidence in strong leaders such as Diego Portales in Chile, Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, and Antonio Guzmán in Venezuela. These leaders used force, fear and repression to build the strength of the central governments. While these transformational leaders did contribute to stability, and allowed infrastructure to grow, the regimes they created did not last any longer than the periods

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of democratic rule. Too many powerful groups were excluded from power and eventually they mobilized to get rid of the dictator one way or another. This phenomenon was repeated across much of the region, although it happened at different times: earlier in Argentina and Chile, later in Mexico and Venezuela. Getting rid of the dictator after he has served his function of establishing order and building infrastructure is a difficult problem. Dictators may be better remembered if they die before dissatisfaction with their regime becomes acute, either through illness or assassination. Of course, this is not a reliable method of regime transition, but in the absence of credible elections, the only other option may be an uprising by rival caudillos as with the end of the Juan Manuel de Rosas dictatorship in Argentina and the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship in Mexico. The struggle between liberals and conservatives was a noteworthy feature of Latin American politics throughout the era of national consolidation. This was a struggle between two competing philosophical or ideological perspectives within the elite, and also a fight for the spoils of office. The conservatives valued order and social discipline and placed reliance on tradition and hierarchy, and especially on strengthening the role of the Roman Catholic Church. The liberals were more concerned with the general improvement and modernization of society, even if it meant challenging some of the traditional ways of the past. With time, the elites came to realize that what they had in common was more important than their differences. Conservatives benefited from the economic development the liberals engendered, and liberals saw that conservative values and institutions helped to prevent unrest from lower classes. In several countries, most notably Colombia, but also in Chile, Mexico after 1867, and Peru, there were understandings between these two groups to share the spoils of office. Even when there were electoral contests between liberals and conservatives, neither group was eager to include peasant farmers or manual laborers, let alone indigenous peoples and former slaves. This led to the development of new parties, especially the Radical Party under the leadership of Hipólito Yrigoyen in Argentina. In Mexico, the resentment of the excluded groups broke out in revolutionary uprisings after the collapse of the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship. In Brazil, it was part of the resentment that fueled the republican movement that conspired with military officers to topple the empire. Left unresolved was the very fundamental problem of incorporating wider sectors of society in the governing coalitions. This was not resolved during the period of national consolidation in Latin America; progress was a little better in the United States, although only for the white population. Substantial progress was made during the next era, that of state development, espe-

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cially in the incorporation of the working class. But the problem of incorporating racial and ethnic minorities persists until this day. NOTE 1. The nine were, as monarch, Maria II of Portugal, Victoria of Great Britain, Isabella II of Spain, Liliuokalani of Hawaii, and Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, and, as regent, Maria Christina of Bourbon-Naples, Maria Christina of Habsburg, Isabel of Brazil, and Emma of WaldeckPrymont.

Chapter Six

Presidential Leadership in the Era of State Development

By the end of the nineteenth century, the American republics had what seemed to be stable political regimes. But this stability was more fragile than it seemed. In some cases it was based on loyalty to a single individual. In most cases it was based on understandings among traditional elites with limited participation by the middle and working classes or the peasantry. National consolidation had brought about improved infrastructure and provided a stable environment for economic development, especially in urban areas. But this development brought with it economic and social changes in the form of new groups and classes that had to be integrated into political systems. How these new groups were to be represented varied. In the United States, regular presidential elections provided a mechanism for reaching out to new groups. In Latin America, respect for electoral processes was less consistent and there was considerable elite resistance to incorporating emerging groups into the polity. Many of the Americas’ most prominent presidents and political leaders emerged during this period, reflecting the increased involvement of the state into all walks of life: political, economic and social. It was not possible to escape the state, both in terms of its scrutiny and surveillance and in the provisions of services such as health, education, social security, even employment. This meant that the individuals at the apex of the state—almost always the presidents—were more important than ever. The role of the president was also strengthened by the development of mass communications, which made it possible for presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States, Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, Juan Perón in Argentina, and 105

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Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico to communicate directly with citizens in their homes. THE UNITED STATES The period of state development in the United States can be divided into three political regimes: Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, from the end of the Civil War to 1896, the Progressive Regime from 1897 to 1932, and the New Deal Regime from 1932 to 1980. All three of these regimes were devoted to strengthening and expanding the state, but for different reasons and in different ways. Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 The Civil War left a deep mark on the US economy and society. For more than a century a figure of 620,000 battlefield dead was generally accepted, 360,000 on the Unionist side and 258,000 on the Confederate side—although recent estimates have increased that figure to 750,000 and no overall estimates for civilian dead can be established (Gugliotta 2012). Approximately 20 percent of white men in the South were estimated to have died. The principal gain from the war was the definitive resolution of the slavery issue. The war left the nation with a much larger government and increased financial obligations. In 1860 national debt was $65 million and the federal budget was $63 million. By 1865 the government’s budget was over $300 million and the national debt had risen to $2.7 billion. An income tax had been introduced for the first time to help pay for the war effort (before being repealed during the 1870s) and high postwar spending continued, both to help rebuild the South and in the form of pensions (Folsom 2011). Exhausted by the war and shocked by the assassination, the nation was not ready for the new challenges that faced it. Even if Lincoln had lived, it would have been very difficult for him to lead a peaceful national consolidation as he had in war. His assassination in 1865 allowed him to enter history as an unsullied war hero, not forced to confront the issue of what to do with the occupied southern states. The Radical Republicans sought to impose harsh penalties against former Confederates and give strong guarantees to freedmen, including enfranchisement, schools and free labor contracts. While Lincoln shared these goals, it is not clear if he would have reconciled them with the goal of reintegrating southern whites into the national fabric. What is clear is that his vice president, Andrew Johnson, was not up to the task. Johnson ascended to the presidency without a clear agenda or a strong mandate. Like many previous presidents, he echoed Jefferson and Jackson by claiming to favor limited government at a time when many pressing problems required firm governmental action. He tried to bring about national

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conciliation by taking a more moderate stance towards the white population in the defeated South than the Radical Republicans demanded. But Andrew Johnson was not an especially conciliatory individual, and was not suited to dealing with the conflicting demands of a very difficult period. As the Union’s military governor in Tennessee during the Civil War, he had clashed with Congress. Now Johnson’s actions as president were directly challenged by the legislature; Congress demanded greater influence in policy making. The resulting confrontation resulted in his impeachment, but not his removal from the presidency (Bergeron 2011). Even though Johnson was still standing at the end of his trial, his influence was weak and political violence continued in the South between former Confederates, Unionists and freedmen. By the mid-1870s, the northern public had tired of dealing with southern problems, wanting the war and its aftermath to be over. The Democratic Party established itself as the dominant party in the South and in the House of Representatives following the 1874 election, and when the 1876 presidential election led to a split in the Electoral College, they were able to remove the US Army from the South as part of an agreement to decide the election. African Americans in the South were denied voting rights and forced to accept subordinate status in a “Jim Crow” caste system. But the ending of slavery was a very important change, especially since it enabled a great many to move to the cities of the North and Midwest. As Reconstruction gave way to disappointment, so too did attitudes towards political life generally and the presidency in particular. This was the period that novelists Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873) had satirized as the greedy and corrupt Gilded Age. We have combined Reconstruction and the Gilded Age here because there was more continuity than change in the political regime. Neither was a period of strong presidential leadership and the scope and prestige of the presidency was diminished. Several reasons accounted for the failure of presidential leadership (Burns 1965). One was the undistinguished character of the personalities who occupied the office and their relationships with their parties. Ulysses Grant and Benjamin Harrison were undermined by their party, Rutherford Hayes was unable to acquire leverage, then came James Garfield’s early assassination and Grover Cleveland’s inability to deal with corruption and tariffs. A second problem was a lack of organization and institutionalization within the presidency, which limited its ability to deal with the wider political environment. And third, there was no crisis to enable a president to take a leading role as Lincoln had. The historiography of the final decades of the nineteenth century portrays Washington, DC, as an arena of buying and trading between nondescript transactional politicians. Weak presidential leadership did not mean a lack of social change. Much of the nation’s energy was taken up with occupying and developing the vast

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territories that had been conquered from Mexico and cleared of Native Americans by the ethnic cleansing of the Jackson regime. US policymakers were in an expansionist mood, echoing the imperialist desire among European leaders of the time. The Progressive Regime, 1897–1932 As the century drew to a close, the country was ready for stronger presidential leadership. In the 1896 presidential election, Ohio governor William McKinley was paired against populist Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was a brilliant orator, religious fundamentalist and opponent of the gold standard who won the nomination at a stalled Democratic Party convention with a historic phrase: “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” The gold standard was generally favored by bankers and monied classes and opposed by farmers who wanted to repay their debts with cheaper currency. To reach out to rural and small town America, Bryan pioneered the “whistle-stop” campaign tour, speaking in hundreds of towns from the last car of his campaign train. McKinley, who supported the gold standard and promised to revive the economy with strong protective tariffs, countered with a “front-porch” campaign, staying home in Canton, Ohio, and meeting with delegations that came every day to see him. McKinley knew he had no chance of competing with Bryan as an orator, but the number of people who could hear a candidate speak was limited before the availability of radio broadcasts. McKinley’s front-porch campaign, with strong financial support from the business elite, won the election. He got the strongest support from urban areas and the eastern states, while Bryan did better with farmers and in the South and the West. The economy did revive during McKinley’s presidency, and his presidency marked a shift toward reliance on a stronger central government to promote business interests, a period that became known as the Progressive Era. McKinley also sought to advance imperialist aims with a short and successful war with Spain over Cuba and the Philippines (Merry 2012). Bryan continued to advocate for rural interests and opposed imperialist ventures. He ran unsuccessful presidential campaigns in 1900 and 1908. Shortly after beginning his second term, in 1901, McKinley was assassinated and his vice president, Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, succeeded him. In foreign policy Roosevelt’s inclinations were more aggressive than McKinley’s. Teddy was an adventurer who had acquired a reputation as a “Rough Rider” during the Spanish-American War and enjoyed the excitement of combat. And he did expand America’s domain by breaking Panama off from Colombia and establishing the Canal Zone. He also reiterated American opposition towards European presence in the region, including a confrontation

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with Germany over unpaid debt with Venezuela in 1902, and he built up the Atlantic and Pacific naval fleets. Yet despite these actions and his predilections, it was not Roosevelt’s fate to be a war leader as Washington, Madison, Polk and Lincoln had been before him. Despite his feeling that Lincoln would not have been remembered if not for the war, Roosevelt himself managed to make his historic mark in domestic policy. Building on McKinley’s activism, Roosevelt may be considered the “first modern president,” who oversaw the expansion of federal regulation and a nascent welfare state, building what critics called “The Imperial Presidency” (Ricard 2011). Roosevelt saw two key challenges facing him: the state of the economy and the political system, both of which could be resolved in a similar fashion. The economy had grown rapidly in the last decades of the nineteenth century, much of it based in the North and associated with manufacturing and industry. At the forefront of this change were large businesses, many of which began to consolidate. Between 1897 and 1904, 4,227 firms merged to create 257 entities and one percent of firms accounted for 45 percent of manufacturing (Hawley 2011, 96). This corporate consolidation was portrayed as the growth of “trusts” in the media and which generated public suspicion and revulsion that eventually coalesced into the Progressive movement. Roosevelt was not opposed to the size of these trusts; indeed, he believed that their rise was largely due to their economic efficiency. What concerned him was their “conduct”; he was concerned that their greedy, selfserving actions adversely affected their customers and the general public (Murphy 2011, 154–55). At the same time, Theodore Roosevelt believed that American society and its politics were undergoing a moral decline and needed revitalization. He thought he could provide this by establishing a more nationalist and majoritarian form of government with a stronger role for executive power. This vision of government placed the president at the center, as the people’s representative, in contrast to the Madisonian view articulated in the Federalist Papers, which identified Congress as the most representative and powerful branch of American politics (Hawley 2011). In keeping with this agenda, Roosevelt pressed to bring interstate corporations under federal regulation. What came to be called “trust-busting” was principally done through what he believed would be nonpartisan administrative agencies. These agencies gave Roosevelt and his appointees much discretionary power, more than previous presidents had exercised except in wartime. Roosevelt’s “revolution” was lasting: his innovations stood the test of time as the federal state expanded over the course of the twentieth century. Indeed, the subsequent expansion of the state into economic planning and activity in the 1930s under his distant relative, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

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might not have possible without the precedent and bureaucratic infrastructure created by these earlier developments. Teddy Roosevelt was and has remained a contradictory figure in US history. His support of capitalist economic activity reflected a Victorian individualism while at the same time contrasting with a more interventionist stance through his regulatory activism (Brinkley and Dyer 2000). He conceived of his role as that of a broker between competing interests; this had the effect of blurring any broader political vision he might have had (Burns 1965). Roosevelt’s support from both liberals and conservatives was expressed in the relatively amorphous Progressive movement, which became particularly evident after he left office. Following disillusion with his former vice president and presidential successor, William Taft, he tried to acquire the Republican nomination for the 1912 election. He failed and so founded the Progressive Party to run as a third-party candidate. The move split Republican votes and gave the presidency to the Democrat, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson continued with much of the progressive agenda, although he was a southerner and a racist who fully supported the segregationist system in the South. Progressives had opposed high tariffs on the grounds that they benefited special interests, so these were brought down. Further anti-trust legislation was passed in 1913 to discourage anti-competitive business practices along with a government-managed central bank. Wilson’s domestic initiatives diminished during his second term as he became more preoccupied with foreign affairs, including the First World War and its aftermath. In addition, war had increased demand and therefore economic growth (Merry 2012). Although this was knocked briefly back in the postwar period, the 1920s has gone down as a “golden age” of economic growth and consumption. During these years the United States became the world’s largest economy and both presidents and Congress adopted a relatively laissez-faire approach to government. This all came to a juddering halt with the Great Depression, triggered by the stock market crash of October 1929. A combination of factors, including rigidity in the international monetary and financial system, excessive speculation in the stock market and subsequent banking crisis in the United States, had consequences at home and abroad. President Herbert Hoover responded by becoming increasingly isolationist and increasing tariffs, further restricting international trade (O’Brien and Williams 2013, 84; Crafts and Fearon 2013). By the early 1930s aggregate demand had plummeted and unemployment had risen to 25 percent. While there was a strong ideological commitment to states’ rights, it became painfully apparent that state governments were institutionally and financially overwhelmed and unable to cope with the crisis. Both politicians and public increasingly looked to the federal government for a response. With a parliamentary system, there could have been an election in 1930 to

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select new leadership, but leadership change had to wait until the presidential election of 1932 (Burns 1965). The New Deal Regime, 1932–1980 The incoming Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) administration in 1933 marked the beginning of the New Deal regime in American politics. The term New Deal was invented by one of Roosevelt’s advisors, and it is generally said to have ended in 1938. However, it established a set of political forces that remained dominant in American politics until 1980. We refer to this long period of expansion of the role of the federal government in domestic policy as the New Deal political regime. Merry (2012) equates the economic crisis that led to the New Deal to the political crisis that led to the Civil War in 1861. In such crises new governments are able to experiment and implement new policies without much opposition. Even though many in FDR’s government had no clear idea how to resolve the crisis, they had to do something, and the tool they had was the federal government. In these first years of the New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the Federal Deposit Insurance Administration, the Public Works Administration, and the Tennessee Valley Authority were passed and bureaucracies established to administer them. With the private sector paralyzed, the federal government became the primary planner, financier, manager and agent of economic activity. As the state became central to economic decision making, groups such as farmers and workers and senior citizens organized pressure groups to express their interests. This led to the growth of a more visible welfare system as these groups became beneficiaries of government financial support. In these ways, the New Deal constituted a further development and institutionalization of the Progressive tradition. The increased role of the state established by FDR was consolidated throughout the 1930s and the following decade, not least by an additional development: the Second World War. Although the United States did not formally enter the war until 1941, it had already been building its own military while providing financial and material assistance to the Allies. As had been the case two decades earlier, war stimulated the economy, encouraging industry and manufacturing and creating jobs. By 1945 both the United States and the world had been transformed; having previously avoided assuming global political power to match its economic status, it now embraced its status as a superpower with interests everywhere. The United States took the lead in competition with the other superpower, the Soviet Union, and the ensuing Cold War justified substantial peacetime military expenditures. Following Roosevelt’s death in early 1945, his successor, Harry Truman, strug-

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gled with these challenges in Europe and Asia, leaving office after a second, elected term in 1953 at a time when the war in Korea between the communist North and the US-supported South ended in a stalemate. After Truman, Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) both sought to contain Soviet power. But whereas Eisenhower was a resisting president who sought to scale back the New Deal regime, or at least keep it from expanding, JFK was charismatic and sought to be a transformational president. His presidency only offered a promise that this would happen, since his life was cut short by assassination in November 1963. His wish to end racial discrimination, in response to the civil rights movement that had shaken the society, was taken up by his vice president and successor Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), who succeeded in enacting the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Opportunity Act, and the Voting Rights Act, legislation which sought to bring an end to the racial oppression that had persisted in the South since the Civil War. In addition LBJ had a vision to create a “Great Society”: the New Deal welfare state was expanded through the creation of Medicare and Medicaid and providing health care to hundreds of thousands of Americans who had not previously been covered. LBJ’s record is a mixed one (Johns 2012). Having previously been a senator, LBJ was comfortable and effective when negotiating legislative deals, but he was not a charismatic speaker. As president, he failed to keep sufficient attention on the implementation of his legislation after it had been passed. As a result, many of the programs and policies varied widely in size and scope, some being poorly funded at the expense of others, and others being too constrained by detailed legislation. The effect of this was to disappoint all sides. For liberals, LBJ’s Great Society rhetoric failed to be matched by the implementation, while conservatives were revolted by what they saw as society’s growing dependency on government handouts. But LBJ’s legacy was undermined most severely by his escalation of the ultimately unsuccessful Vietnam War, which had heavy human costs while constraining funding for the Great Society (Murray and Blessing 1988). This led to massive student protests and unrest among blacks in the inner cities, causing his popularity to decline to the point that he chose not to run for reelection in 1968. This was despite the fact that his foreign policy, other than in Vietnam, was reasonably successful. The civil rights legislation he succeeded in enacting raised expectations beyond what he was able to fulfill, but it was an important step toward fulfilling the promises of equality made with the abolition of slavery.

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BRAZIL Vargas and the Estado Novo (New State), 1930–1946 The global depression following the New York Stock Exchange crash in 1929 finally pushed Brazil out of its doldrums. There was a sharp decline in the market for Brazilian exports, and a drastic cut in the revenues needed to maintain the structures of the government and the benefits to favored groups such as coffee growers. These stresses, combined with the general disaffection with the government, led to a bloodless civilian-military coup in October 1930 against the president-elect, Julio Prestes, in favor of his defeated rival, Getúlio Vargas. Vargas was notable in that he hailed from the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, thereby breaking the presidential monopoly that São Paulo and Minas Gerais states had enjoyed since the 1890s. Vargas is Brazil’s equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the United States, Juan Perón in Argentina and Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico. He guided his country into the era of state development. He was an unlikely figure to become what some historians have called “the most influential Brazilian of the twentieth century” (Levine 1998, 2). He was five foot two inches tall and rotund; when he was sent to a military school in the state of Minas Gerais, the students nicknamed him Xuxu, a pear-like vegetable. His physical stature should be irrelevant, of course, and it seems to have been in Brazil, but it has often been observed that in the United States the taller of the two candidates is more likely to win presidential elections. So it is of interest that this pattern does not seem to hold in Brazilian history. As a young man, Vargas had enlisted in the military and was sent to the frontier with Bolivia, but he decided he was not cut out for the military life. So he got a doctor to sign a note saying he had epilepsy, which he did not. He then went to law school, where he developed a gift for oratory. He was named class orator and edited the school’s student newspaper. After graduation, his father got him an appointment as assistant district attorney. He was elected to the state Chamber of Deputies at age 26, and began a meteoric political career. Vargas was often characterized as Machiavellian. He played his cards very close to his chest, systematically playing one group off against another. He was also prone to periods of depression, at one time remarking “how many times I have longed for death to solve the problems of my life” (Levine 1998, 1). But no one took these pleas seriously. Vargas appealed to Brazilians who had long felt neglected by the elitism of the coffee-with-milk regime. This included people from peripheral states who felt ignored by the wealthier central states, and junior military officers (known as tenentes or lieutenants) who felt frustrated by their superior officers’ apparent lack of dynamism.

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There were others who also sensed the vulnerability of the old regime, including radical groups on both the left and the right. Vargas played them off against each other brilliantly, encouraging them to feel that they had his confidence, then suppressing them when they got out of line. In 1935 there was an attempted uprising by the Brazilian Communist Party, led by one of Brazil’s most charismatic military officers, Captain Luís Carlos Prestes, who had been a leader of a lieutenant’s revolt against the oligarchy in 1924. Rather than giving in politely when the revolt failed, as the leaders of military uprisings often did, Prestes had led a column of his troops on a 15,534mile march through the Brazilian interior in 1926 and 1927. They hoped to rally the peasantry against the regime, but got little response and ended up going into exile in Bolivia. But they were greatly admired for their commitment to principle. Jorge Amado, one of Brazil’s most famous novelists, called Prestes the “Knight of Hope” in a best-selling biography published by the international communist press in the 1940s. The book was translated into more than a dozen languages, but not into English. Finally in 1937, using the pretext of another leftist rebellion, Vargas cancelled the 1934 constitution which had replaced the pre-1930 regime and established the Estado Novo, or New State (Williamson 2009, Levine 1980). The Estado Novo was a corporatist entity which ensured that all key interests—labor, business, industry, students and teachers—were organized and therefore represented within the regime. However, the relationship between these different social and economic groups was not equal; it was a hierarchical one where demands were directed upwards to the government and its political and economic supporters, and pressure groups were made to accept their rulings. One of the most visible groups associated with the Estado Novo was the protofascist Integralist movement, a group which adopted the Greek letter sigma (∑), the mathematical symbol for summation, as a Brazilian equivalent of the German Nazi’s swastika or the Italian Fascist’s fasces. Vargas offered them a position in his new government, giving them an inflated sense of their power. The Integralists held out for more and attempted a coup in 1938. For a brief moment Vargas’ position looked precarious, but the situation was resolved when the military leadership (by now purged of leftists) decided to throw its support behind Vargas rather than the Integralists. Like the leftist Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL) before it, the Integralists were now banned and its leader forced into exile (Levine 1980, 1998). Having outsmarted his opponents on both extremes, Vargas’ power was now secure. There were elements of his rule that pleased both the left and the right. He followed a corporatist model inspired by Italian fascism in which important interest groups, including labor and capital, were incorporated in the government. When business and labor had disagreements, they were to be resolved by special labor courts. The state also undertook major industrial

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development projects, including a mining and metals company, Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, which started in 1942. This statist development approach appealed to the left because it was closer to the Soviet than the Fascist model but it was really the only way the country could undertake major industrial development since at the time there were no private investors, domestic or foreign, prepared to undertake such projects in Brazil. The Second Republic, 1946–1964 With the end of the Second World War, the contradiction of dictatorship at home while fighting in the name of democracy in Europe was embarrassing to the military as well as to many civilians. The armed forces forced Vargas to resign on October 29, 1945, and go into internal exile in his home state of Rio Grande do Sul. One of the generals who had forced Vargas to resign, Eurico Dutra, was elected president on December 2, 1946. Dutra’s differences with Vargas were not over economic policy, and he continued expanding the public sector by nationalizing foreign-owned railways and subsidizing industrial development. Dutra’s main contribution was showing that these goals could be pursued within the framework of democratic politics. The military’s main concern was avoiding a personalistic dictatorship by Getúlio Vargas, not changing policies. But Vargas’ status was undimmed; he remained immensely popular. Following the replacement of the Estado Novo with the more democratic Second Republic, Vargas reinvented himself, replacing his role as corporatist dictator with a new populist and democratic persona as leader of the newly created Brazilian Labor Party. In 1950 he stood in the presidential election and was elected with 49 percent of the vote, with the rest of the votes divided between two other candidates. The new democratic political system was both pluralistic and polarizing and Vargas faced difficulties adapting to the new system. It was easier during the Estado Novo when he just ran things. In the end he threw his lot in with the left by raising national wages and establishing the state oil company, Petrobras, in 1953. He was increasingly seen as a champion of the working class and the poor, and his more conservative opponents became increasingly concerned that he would incorporate the communists into his electoral base. Increasingly, conservative politicians and military officers agitated for his removal. When a member of his bodyguard was accused of a failed assassination attempt against his most vocal opponent, the conservative Rio de Janeiro governor, Carlos Lacerda, there were movements behind the scenes to overthrow him. Then, in August 1954, Vargas shocked the nation by committing suicide. He had long had problems with depression which probably had nothing to do with his political career, which was not going badly at the time. But he

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framed his suicide as a political act by leaving a dramatic Final Testament, saying, “I gave you my life, now I give you my death . . . my soul will be with you . . . I leave life to enter history.” There were mass demonstrations of grief; many Brazilians felt as if they had lost a father. And subsequent governments, both civilian and military, did continue his model of a corporatist and developmentalist state. The next transformational presidential figure, after the shock of Vargas’ death, was Juscelino Kubitschek, in office from 1955 to 1961 (Pinheiro 2001, Alexander 1991). Kubitschek was a physician who had affiliated with the Social Democratic Party and been mayor of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, and governor of that state. His father’s last name was Oliveira, but he chose to use his mother’s maiden name because it was more distinctive. His father died when he was two and he was raised in difficult circumstances by his mother, who was half Czech and half Roma or gypsy in origin. He had two opponents in the election, one from the conservative National Democratic Union, an anti-Vargas party, and the other a populist from São Paulo. His victory margin was small, but he was an immensely popular president because of his optimism, ebullience and political skill. Kubitschek was a visionary futurist who promised Brazil “fifty years of growth in five years.” His most dramatic accomplishment was the building of Brasília, the new federal capital in the interior of the country. Politicians had been talking about doing this for years, but Kubitschek actually made it happen by printing and spending immense amounts of money. His government was characterized by high levels of corruption and deficit spending that accelerated inflation, but most Brazilians forgave him for these faults because the economy was booming. By the end of his term, industrial production was up 80 percent and inflation was at 30 percent a year. After his term, Kubitschek was remembered as highly popular and successful. But political polarization and dissent were present both at the start and end of his presidency. Indeed, Kubitschek almost never came to power because of these divisions. Elected with 35.7 percent of the vote, he was viewed with suspicion by conservative politicians. At the end of his term, in 1960, the conservative anti-Kubitschek candidate, Jânio Quadros, was elected president and the leftist Joao Goulart to the vice presidency. The Brazilian constitution of the time allowed for the president and vice president to be elected from opposing parties. Despite being a conservative by temperament, in practice Quadros was a political maverick with no support base in Congress. His main electoral symbol was a broom with which he promised to sweep Brasília clean of corruption. This did not endear him to the legislators, and he was unable to build sufficient majorities to pass his key bills. His independence raised suspicions both in Washington and the military when he decorated Che Guevara during a visit in 1961. Soon after that, he unexpectedly resigned the

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presidency, apparently expecting to be called back by popular acclaim. But there was no public clamor for his return, and the Congress decided to just let him go. He was replaced by his vice president, João Goulart, a former protégé of Vargas associated with the left. Goulart happened to be on a visit to China when Quadros resigned, and the military did not want to allow him to return. They finally agreed to his resuming the presidency only on condition that the constitution be revised to follow a parliamentary system in which the president would have greatly reduced powers. Goulart took office under this constraint, but in 1963 he won a plebiscite which offered Brazilians a choice between a parliamentary or presidential system, and assumed full presidential powers. Jango, as he was known, had grown up on a ranch in Rio Grande do Sul and his father was close friends with Getúlio Vargas. He became a confidant and protégé of Vargas and was minister of labor in the last Vargas government. Vargas had entrusted his suicide letter to Jango and he was as close to being Vargas’ heir apparent as anyone, but he lacked Vargas’ Machiavellian skills. If Karl Marx was watching from the grave, he might have said that Jango Goulart’s presidency was the farce following the tragedy of Getúlio Vargas’ suicide. Egged on by the left to use his newly restored power, Goulart proposed land reform, expropriation of the private petroleum distribution companies and airlines, constitutional reform to allow presidential re-election, and the legalizing of the communist party. In early 1964 he appealed to the public to provide him with sufficient support to gain decree power—the same powers that Quadros had sought (Busey 1965, Evans 1968). But he misjudged the strength of popular support for the changes he wanted to make; his demands actually united the conservatives and the military against him. The economy was in crisis: inflation was 34.7 percent in 1961, 50.1 percent in 1962, 78.4 percent in 1963, and approaching 100 percent in the beginning of 1964. But crises of this sort are not uncommon in Brazil, and this one was exacerbated by the political uncertainty which spooked investors. It could have been resolved with an anti-inflation plan and support from the International Monetary Fund. But many on the left thought of this as surrendering to capitalist imperialism. They thought Brazil was in a crisis that could only be resolved with a radical transition to a socialist regime. Peasant leagues were mobilizing for land reform in the northeast, radicals were organizing labor unions among the enlisted men in the armed forces, the Cuban revolution was in full bloom, and Marxist theories of several varieties were in vogue. But there was also a massive backlash against the leftist movements, culminating in March 1964 in huge demonstrations called Marches of the Family for God and Liberty in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and other cities. The marches were in response to reform plans President Goulart had announced to a leftist rally on March 13.

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The people had voted, in the referendum, to have a president with independent powers instead of a prime minister who could have been removed by parliament if he didn’t perform well. Perhaps they were hoping for a man with the political skills of Getúlio Vargas or Juscelino Kubitschek. But they got João Goulart, who didn’t seem to know what he was doing. Under the presidential system, the opposition could have lobbied Congress to resist Goulart’s proposed changes, and waited until the next election to choose a successor. But they had no more faith in Congress than they did in the presidency. The primary goal of the opposition demonstrators was to encourage the military to intervene. The Military Regime, 1964–1985 The response was swift: on April 1, 1964, the military, supported by the governors of the major states, mobilized against Goulart and forced him into exile. Resistance was surprisingly weak; the revolutionary left was strong on rhetoric but weak on organization or preparation for armed struggle. The generals who took power in 1964 quashed a perceived communist threat by suppressing democracy while strengthening economic statism. The military wanted to avoid a personalist dictatorship, so they continued the ritual of regular presidential elections without allowing a president to be re-elected. They also left Congress and the judiciary in place. In many ways, they stressed continuity with the Vargas and New Republic regimes rather than radical change (Peixoto 2015). At first, the new regime followed the policies favored by the “soft” camp within the military. These officers favored a quick return to constitutional rule, with military intervention seen as a temporary solution to the political instability and polarization that had shaken the country. On the other side, there were the “hard-line” members of the military who believed that they needed to be a strong and active presence in government for a longer period to rid the country of a persistent subversive threat. The first of the military presidents was Humberto Castelo Branco, a softline general with a scholarly bent who had always defended democracy when he taught courses in the Superior War College. He was the scion of a distinguished family in the northeastern city of Fortaleza; his father was also a general and there were some distinguished writers in his mother’s family. He was short and few thought him attractive; it was often said that he had no neck. When he proposed marriage, the girl’s father insisted he have a medical exam to assure that he was not carrying a genetic defect. He was not, and he went on to a distinguished military career, serving with the Brazilian forces in Italy during the Second World War, and publishing studies of the war effort for the military academy (Dulles 1978).

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Castelo Branco anticipated a quick return to civilian rule. He was associated with the constitutionalist side of the armed forces and oversaw the drafting of a new constitution in 1966 which allowed for presidential elections, but only indirectly through congress. Unlike the previous constitution, candidates for president and vice president would stand on the same ticket, which meant that the death or resignation of a president should be less traumatic. He also revoked the political rights of the most charismatic opposition politicians, on the theory that politics had been distorted by demagoguery. It is conceivable that democracy might have been restored more quickly if the left had focused on the democracy issue and limited itself to nonviolent protest. There were large nonviolent student demonstrations against the dictatorship. But these were repressed or ignored, and, instead of persisting with a focus on democracy, the most militant students joined urban and rural guerrilla movements advocating a Cuban-style revolution. The generals were slow to respond to these armed resistance movements, but they came to see them as confirming the anti-communist views of the hard-line officers. The armed movements failed to mobilize mass support and were repressed by the military police relying heavily on the torture of suspects to find hidden revolutionary cells. The Brazilian military did not, however, kill many revolutionaries or activists once they were captured. There was nothing equivalent to the mass killings by the military regimes that followed in Argentina and Chile. Congress was temporarily closed by military decree and new electoral rules were devised that led to a two-party system, one of which supported the government (ARENA, the national renovation alliance) and the other the tolerated opposition (MDB, the Brazilian democratic movement). Cynics called them the “yes” party and the “yes, sir” party, and it seemed that way at first, but as the military regime dragged on, the MDB became more and more popular as a real opposition. At the end of Castelo Branco’s term, in 1966, the Congress elected the hard-line Marshal Artur da Costa e Silva (Portella de Mello 1979) under the provisions of an institutional act giving them that power. The military convened a committee of parliamentarians and jurists to draft a new constitution, which was adopted by the Congress in 1967. It included an electoral college system instead of direct elections for president. The electoral college included the whole federal Congress together with representatives from state assemblies and from municipalities. It gave more weight to small rural states than to the states with large cities. The theory was that this would lead to a more considered choice, free from the seductions of populist rhetoric. Costa e Silva had a severe cerebral thrombosis in August 1969 and had to be relieved of the presidency. The military refused to let the civilian vice president take power, despite the provisions of their own constitution. A temporary military junta took power until a new general, Garrastazu Médici,

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could be “elected.” Médici was the grandson of Italian and Basque immigrants who had settled in Rio Grande do Sul. He had worked his way up the army hierarchy since 1920, and by 1967 he was head of the National Information Service as well as commander of the army based in São Paulo. He was close to Costa e Silva and strongly anti-communist (Silva 1983). The Médici government was generally popular with the public because the Brazilian economy went into a boom known as the “Brazilian miracle,” which peaked from 1969 to 1973, with 14 percent GDP growth in that year. Capitalism was clearly not in its death agony as some on the left had assumed. But there are no miracles in economics and booms are followed by busts. The military government’s popularity tumbled when the boom ended in a miasma of debt and inflation. At the end of Médici’s term, in 1974, the soft-line generals rallied their forces behind Ernesto Geisel (Cury 1978), another general from Rio Grande do Sul. Geisel was the son of German immigrants, although the town he grew up in was populated mostly by families that had come from Italy. He felt that his parents were stricter than those of most of his neighbors, and more focused on him getting a rigorous education. His father taught the German language and Geisel spoke it as well as Portuguese at home. He made his career in the military and served through the Vargas regime. He also served, beginning in 1969, as head of Petrobras, the state oil monopoly, and in other administrative roles. As president, Geisel began a gradual process known as the “democratic opening,” partly inspired by the writings of American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1968) and others who advocated “political decompression” and a transition to democracy in Third World countries ruled by authoritarian governments. These theories argued that authoritarian regimes lose their effectiveness when they remain in power too long. Rather than bottling up dissent until it explodes, Huntington said they should gradually open the system to accommodate it. Similar ideas were advanced in Brazil by General Golbery do Couto e Silva, whose book Geopolitica do Brasil (Silva 1967), first published in 1955, had been very widely read and established Golbery’s prestige as a military intellectual. Beginning in 1974, Golbery advocated strongly for a democratic opening. Geisel and his successor, in 1979, João Figueiredo (Silva 1983), followed this strategy and made it work. Figueiredo was the son of a general who had been exiled after supporting an anti-Vargas uprising in 1932. He was head of the National Information Service during the Geisel government and was chosen by Geisel and the other generals as Geisel’s successor. He took power at a difficult time because the “Brazilian miracle” had crashed and unemployment, inflation and foreign debt had soared. Geisel and Figueiredo were tasked with maintaining a regime that was declining in support both among the general public and the civilian elites. It was during his presidency that growing numbers of protests

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and social organization took place; politicians took note, with the opposition tabling a constitutional amendment for direct presidential elections which was supported by a large-scale campaign by political parties and social movements during 1983–1984. Although the amendment failed, Congress listened: in the (indirect) election which occurred in 1985, Congress voted for an opposition candidate and civilian politician, Tancredo Neves, to be Brazil’s next president. MEXICO In Mexico the state consolidation accomplished by the Liberal presidents Benito Juarez and Porfirio Díaz was shattered by the failure of the system to broker an orderly transition of power to Díaz’s successor. The period which followed, from 1910 to 1917, was the negation of the positivist vision of orderly progress under the guidance of technocrats. This period came to be called The Revolution, and its major outcome was the constitution of 1917, which provided the framework for state development. After that, there was a period of assertion of power by strongmen who at least maintained order. We have labelled that whole period The Maximato, although that term is usually only applied to the period of indirect rule by Elias Calles after 1928. Finally, Mexico entered a long period of rule by a single party that completed the process of state development and even brokered the transition to neoliberal economics. The Revolution, 1910–1920 Francisco Madero was the scion of a wealthy family in northern Mexico, and a principled Liberal who had a vision of a modern democratic Mexico, but little understanding of the social forces that were about to be unleashed by the collapse of the Porfirian state. Madero was not the typical image of a president or of a revolutionary. He was only five feet tall with a squeaky voice and he was very involved in a sect that communicated with the dead. But the public viewed him as a refreshing change, and after Porfirio was forced to resign, he was elected with almost 90 percent of the vote in October 1911. Porfirio had been forced out by rebellious caudillos in the north and peasant revolutionaries in the south, and respecting the legitimacy of the electoral process was not a priority for either group. In 1913, one of the generals, Victoriano Huerta, threw Madero out of office in a coup. Madero and his vice president were murdered a few days later. Huerta was a Huichol Indian from Jalisco who had made a successful career as a military engineer and general. He seems to have identified with the Porfirian regime and wanted to re-establish order and progress, and he was supported in this

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endeavor by the United States ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson. Henry was no relation to President Woodrow Wilson, who recalled him and landed troops in Veracruz to support the restoration of democracy. In any event, Huerta was not in power long enough to establish any track record. His complicity in the murder of Madero was greatly resented; he is generally known in Mexican history as “The Jackal” or “The Usurper.” Huerta’s military dictatorship was defeated by troops led by Venustiano Carranza, a son of wealthy cattle ranchers in the north, together with peasant revolutionaries led by Emiliano Zapata in the south, and forces led by caudillos Pancho Villa and Álvaro Obregón in the north, among others. There was much fighting between the different forces, with the peasant armies demanding land reform and the conservative forces wanting to maintain property rights and establish order. Carranza had been a supporter of Madero, and when his forces succeeded in occupying Mexico City, he declared himself provisional president. He was recognized by the United States as president of Mexico in 1915, and he was formally elected under a new constitution in 1917. Carranza believed that Madero’s goals were good, but that he had failed because he was weak and overly humanistic. Unlike Madero, Carranza was tall, 6'4", and impressive physically, but he did not have a charismatic personality that inspired personal loyalty. He thought that it was a mistake to put social reforms, especially land reform, in the constitution when the political realities would not allow them to be implemented. His proposed constitution was essentially a return to the previous system. He wanted the convention that was trying to negotiate a new constitution to promise a legitimate election to choose a successor. Many of the more radical forces resented Carranza’s reluctance to impose radical land reforms and other measures, and Álvaro Obregón joined with Plutarco Elías Calles and other generals from the north to plot his overthrow. They argued that Carranza would never actually give up power, and Obregón’s forces drove Carranza out of Mexico City in 1920. Carranza then set up shop in Veracruz, the country’s largest port and the source of most of the customs revenue. Finally, however, Carranza was betrayed and either committed suicide after being wounded or was murdered. The revolution was over. The Maximato, 1920–1933 In 1920, Álvaro Obregón was elected president of Mexico. By this time, the country was devastated and exhausted. The human cost had been tremendous, with estimates ranging from 1.9 to 3.5 million people killed out of a population of about 15 million (McCaa 2001). The public was hopeful that all the violence could lead to something positive. These hopes were ex-

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pressed in the passing of the constitution of 1917, a remarkably progressive document that emphasized social rights, including the right to own land and to organize labor unions, as well as political rights. It also established the supremacy of the state over the Catholic Church. Obregón and his advisors met the nation’s need for hope by reframing the period of chaos and killing from 1910 to 1917 as “The Mexican Revolution.” This claimed world historical status similar to the American and French and Russian Revolutions. Obregón was guided in this process by José Vasconcellos, a writer and philosopher who served as secretary of education. The artistic community was mobilized, notably the muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco, who covered the walls of government buildings with inspiring sagas of class struggle and revolution. Obregón’s government greatly expanded public education and created a labor department that gave organized labor a role in the system. After his four-year term, Obregón could not run for re-election because “effective suffrage with no re-election” was the slogan of the Mexican Revolution plastered on every document and poster. So he nominated Elias Calles, his interior minister, as his successor. Calles implemented the anti-Catholic provisions of the constitution and had to suppress a rebellion of Cristeros, or soldiers of Christ, at a cost of some 90,000 lives. In 1928, the constitution was modified to allow multiple non-consecutive presidential terms so as to allow Álvaro Obregón to run again. But Obregón was assassinated before he took power, and Congress appointed a temporary president. Calles could not take over for Obregón because of the no-reelection credo, but he planned to assert real power from behind the scenes. As he succeeded in this scheme, he became known as the Jefe Máximo or Maximum Chief. The regime he created is known as Rule of the Maximum Chief or El Maximato. One-Party Dominance, 1934–1988 In 1934, Calles nominated his comrade-in-arms General Lázaro Cárdenas to run as the candidate of the new Partido Nacional Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Party or PNR), which had been formed in 1930 and which ultimately would be named the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). Cárdenas was supposed to be a figurehead for the Jefe Máximo, but he managed to assert his independence by using presidential prerogatives and a good deal of political acumen. He also used his presidential powers to massively accelerate the land reform, which had been progressing very slowly under Obregón and Calles. Politically, there was to be a presidential election every six years, but without re-election to prevent a repetition of the problems of the Porfiriato. Opposition parties were

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allowed, but they had little support and no one trusted the honesty of the electoral process. With a powerful organization behind him, Cárdenas was able to maximize the use of his presidential powers. Land reform was extended to 800,000 beneficiaries. In addition, the Cárdenas presidency had a profound effect on the wider economy when he nationalized the country’s oil industry, much to the consternation of the United States and the international oil companies. This reflected a sea change in Mexican politics, according to Beezley and Myer (2000, 5), in that the country was no longer dominated by the concentration of private capital. In some ways the new system under the PRI resembled the Porfiriato. It had elite technocrats that elaborated policies to facilitate economic growth and progress. But it was not dominated by a single individual as the Porfiriato had been, at least not for more than a six-year term. The PRI was a corporatist party designed to incorporate major interest groups, especially agriculture, labor, the military and state employees including teachers. In this sense it was a precursor to Brazil’s Estado Novo. Although organized interests were important, arguably real power was concentrated in the leadership, between politicians and technocrats on one side and entrepreneurs on the other (Meyer 1977, 13–14). It presented itself as an inclusive entity, designed to accommodate Mexicans from all parts of society. This approach was largely a reaction to the previous chaos and exclusionary nature of the revolution (Needler 1982, 7). Indeed, the PRI’s inclusive nature provided it with a degree of legitimacy that persisted into the 1970s, which Roger Bartra (2013, 9–10) noted as being underpinned by a peasant economy and populist organizations and institutions and territory controlled by caciques associated with the ruling party. The one-party political regime lasted for two generations, although it was weakening in the last decades. Between the 1940s and 1960s the “Mexican miracle” meant economic growth of around 6 percent per annum and the rise in the size of the middle class. An image of economic development and political stability was emphasized by the regime and its supporters. This did not hide the fact that not everyone benefited equally: massive fortunes were made at the top while those who challenged the state, including peasant leaders during the 1940s and 1950s and railway workers in Mexico City in 1958–1959, were repressed (Walker 2013, 8–9). From the late 1960s economic challenges and social change meant that particular groups became exposed to poverty and inequality, resulting in social unrest and the regime’s use of violent repression against student protestors in 1968. This was coupled with neoliberal economic policies which exacerbated the fate of the poor. Gradually, in the 1980s and 1990s, the electoral system became more competitive, especially in the more urban and

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modern states, and there were opposition victories at the local and state levels. The PRI’s stranglehold on power began to weaken. There were no primary elections which could have introduced democratic competition into a one-party system. Citizens had no say in who would be chosen as the PRI candidate until the outgoing president pointed him out. Even within the PRI, corporatist interest groups had little say. The party was divided into two parts: the technocrats and the politicians, with the latter keeping a hold over candidate selection—and consequently stability. Every six years the press and pundits awaited the dedazo, or “fingering,” when the candidate was announced. Meanwhile, outside the PRI, minority parties were allowed to run candidates at the presidential level, but they usually had no chance of winning because they didn’t have a role in counting the votes. This system brought stability, at the expense of considerable corruption, repression and bureaucratization, and ensuring a thin veneer of democracy was retained; there was to be no military coup such as those in Chile, Argentina or Brazil. Schlefer (2008, 5–6) observes that competing “grupos” or factions cooperated with each other in the PRI during the 1950s and 1960s to maintain the regime. Theirs was a positive-sum relationship, since even if they lost the candidacy for the presidency, they would be considered for inclusion in government and the ministries. A whole series of PRI presidents from 1940 to 1970 worked within the framework established during the Cárdenas years: Manuel Ávila Camacho, Miguel Alemán Valdés, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo López Mateos and Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. Alemán is notable among these presidents for being the first civilian to complete his presidential term and for introducing the first “technocratic wave” into government, through the involvement of collegeeducated leaders such as college professors and students. Although technocrats had been in government previously, most notably during the Profiriato, Alemán’s generation emphasized not only the value of the federal executive branch but the national bureaucracy as an area for employment. Second and third waves of technocratic leadership were associated with the economic managers under Salinas and Calderón in the late 1980s and mid-2000s, respectively (Camp 2010, 13–14). In the aftermath of the 1968 protests, the regime was able to make major changes in economic and social policies whenever the elites and technocrats judged that conditions required them. During the 1970s, for example, the increase in oil production and revenue contributed to the national coffers and helped finance PRI governments’ social policies and welfare. Under the PRI, Mexico went from nationalizing American oil companies (in 1938) to joining the North American Free Trade Agreement (in 1994). In 2013, a newly elected PRI government, in a multi-party democratic regime, moved to open exploration to global oil companies.

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However, even as the regime maintained this façade, there were rising tensions. During the 1970s and into the 1980s, there was political and economic strain. Schmidt (1991) marks a decline in the regime during the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970–1976). While he had come to office promising nationalism, anti-imperialism and a recharging of the political system (especially in the wake of 1968), he faced a number of problems, including opposition from the business elite which resulted in political and economic confrontation. Similarly, his successor, José López Portillo (1976–1982), also faced difficulties with the 1982 debt crisis, which occurred at the end of his presidency. The PRI presidents in these periods also faced challenges to their legitimacy; whereas earlier presidents could draw on their martial experience in the revolution and therefore their status as caudillos on white horses leading armed bands and promoting radical changes, later PRI presidents were mainly technocrats in business suits managing an established regime. In contrast to the cooperation between PRI groups within government after 1940, relations between the factions became zero-sum as governments became exclusive, locking out their rivals (Schlefer 2008, 5–6). The presidency of Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) was devoted to defending a decaying system. The broader and deeper economic and social dislocation evident since 1968 gained a visible presence in the form of a disconnected political elite. De la Madrid, a lawyer with a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, who was the secretary of budget and planning before becoming president, had to manage the economic crisis following the debt default in 1982, the impact of which had repercussions on Mexican society as it entered into a decade of austerity. How it was managed became the story of the last PRI presidents (Salinas and Zedillo) and their successors, to be discussed in the next chapter. COLOMBIA The Liberal Republic, 1930–1946 As we saw in the last chapter, under the leadership of Rafael Reyes the Colombians established elite consensus on a system with two parties that tolerated each other, shared the spoils of office, and often worked together. The Liberals came to accept stronger government and to tolerate a role for the Catholic Church in education and social life, while the Conservatives were increasingly accepting of modern ideas, especially when they led to economic growth. In the 1930 election, the Conservative candidate lost and ceded power to the Liberal candidate, Olaya Herrera. Colombia is exceptional in Latin America for not having had a revolutionary change of government in response to the global depression.

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The downside of elite consensus was that it was largely limited to the elites at the national level. At the local level, Liberals and Conservatives often didn’t get along so well. When the Liberals won the presidency in 1930, there was an outburst of violence on the local level as victorious Liberal activists settled old scores with Conservatives. There were also divisions within parties, which often led to splits and splintering. The Conservative Party especially was torn with divisions, which is a good part of why they lost in 1930, and certainly why they did not even nominate a presidential candidate in 1934. Thus Colombia entered period of Liberal dominance that lasted until 1946. The Liberal president who was elected in 1934, Alfonso López, began an accelerated reform program he called “The Revolution on the March” that included agrarian and labor reforms, modelled in part on those of the Cárdenas government in Mexico and the Roosevelt government in the United States. His goal was to improve the lot of “that vast and miserable economic class that does not read, that does not write, that does not dress, that does not wear shoes, that barely eats, that remains . . . on the margin of [national life]” (Bushnell 1993, location 2501). He instituted constitutional reforms in 1936 very similar to those of the Mexican constitution of 1917, favoring economic and social rights over property rights. He also removed a constitutional provision requiring that education must follow Roman Catholic principles. His incorporation of new groups into the Liberal Party suggested political innovation to root Colombian politics more deeply in the social structure. But López had difficulty controlling the backlash to his reforms which threatened the elite consensus. His reforms invoked bitter opposition from Conservatives and even from some Liberals, who saw him as a communist sympathizer. In 1938, a more moderate Liberal, Eduardo Santos, was elected when the Conservatives refused to put up a candidate of their own. But López was reelected in 1942 in a bitterly contested race. The Conservative opposition, led by Laureano Gómez, a vitriolic polemicist, vigorously criticized everything the Liberals tried to do. There was an abortive coup attempt in 1944, which was quickly suppressed, but López resigned in frustrated discouragement a few months later. He took the job of United Nations ambassador, then later ambassador to the United Kingdom. The cause of López’s discouragement was not so much the Conservative opposition, but the split in his own party, where many felt that the reforms were not coming fast enough. The Liberal establishment was challenged by a rapidly growing populist movement led by Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. He was a mestizo of lower-middle-class origins and a gifted orator who denounced the wealthy, oligarchic elite that dominated both parties as well as the Church, the government, the schools and big business. He had no clearly defined program, and the initiatives he did propose were not terribly different from

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those of López. But his angry, disparaging tone was frightening to the established elites of both parties. Two candidates ran on the Liberal ticket in 1946, the populist Eliécer Gaitán and the mainstream Liberal, Gabriel Tubray. The Conservatives managed to agree on a single candidate, Mariano Ospina, who thus won the election although the two Liberals together had more than half the votes. There were violent episodes in the countryside, apparently caused when peasants allied with the Conservatives were encouraged to seize land from peasants allied with the Liberals (Livingstone 2004, 42). La Violencia, 1946–1957 After the election, Tubray retired from politics and the Liberals rallied around Gaitán, by far their most inspiring candidate. It seemed highly likely that he would win the presidency at the next election. Then, on April 9, 1948, he was assassinated on the streets of Bogotá, almost certainly by an unbalanced man acting alone. But many Liberals assumed the Conservatives had done it, while the Conservatives blamed the communists. Massive rioting broke out in Bogotá and throughout the country. The event is usually known as the Bogotazo outside the country, but it was nationwide and Colombians usually just refer to it at The Ninth of April. Much of downtown Bogotá was gutted, right in the middle of an inter-American conference being held in the city. The fighting was not limited to the city and it did not settle down. There was a decade of bitter fighting between groups of all kinds loosely associated with the Liberals and the Conservatives. This period is known as La Violencia and led to the death of at least 200,000 people. The rural violence actually began in 1946 with the Conservative electoral victory. But it exploded after Gaitán was killed. Hundreds of thousands abandoned their homes and farms out of fear, flooding into the cities. The Liberals won the congressional elections in June 1949, but they withdrew from the presidential election in November of the same year, claiming that it was unsafe to campaign in the climate of violence. The Conservative, Laureano Gómez, won running unopposed, but the Liberals didn’t accept him as legitimate. Gómez was a strict conservative who believed that democracy had destabilized the country. He had made his whole career by criticizing the Liberals for pandering to the masses. The way to prevent another Bogotazo, leading to a communist revolution, was to pass a new constitution strengthening the executive power at the expense of the Congress. Many members of Congress were to be elected, not by popular vote, but by corporate groups such as labor, business, and the Catholic Church. Rural violence continued throughout the Laureano Gómez presidency. Gómez seemed intent on maximizing his own personal power and alienated

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members of the Ospina faction of the Conservative Party along with, of course, militant opposition from the Liberals and groups to their left. Finally, the military under General Rojas Pinilla forced Gómez to resign. The cause was the ongoing turmoil in the country and the split in the ruling Conservative Party. Rojas Pinilla was not really prepared for the presidency. He declared himself in favor of a “Christian and Bolivarian State” but no one had any idea what that meant. He offered amnesty to Liberal guerrillas, many of whom decided to give him a chance. But Rojas Pinilla decided not to form a government of reconciliation uniting leaders from both parties. Instead, he modelled himself on Juan Domingo Perón, in Argentina, building a personal dictatorship with links to the labor movement. When it became clear that he was preparing for a second term, the business elites, labor groups and military command united in convincing him to go into exile. The National Front, 1958–1986 At this point, the leadership of both major parties agreed that partisan rivalry was tearing the country apart. The leaders in this effort were former Conservative president Laureano Gómez (1950–1953) and former Liberal president Alberto Lleras (1945–1946, 1958–1962). In 1957, they issued the Declaration of Sitges in which they proposed an unusual bipartisan national unity coalition, known as the National Front. All elective and appointive positions were to be shared equally and the presidency would alternate between the two parties every four years for sixteen years. The plan was approved in a national referendum in December 1957, and Alberto Lleras of the Liberal Party was elected to the presidency in August 1958. For a time, the National Front seemed to work in that La Violencia ended, although it is not clear whether the institutional framework was the cause or if it was just exhaustion. One view suggests that the fighting ended because there was no need for Liberals and Conservative to fight over local patronage positions, since each was guaranteed half of them. The divide between Catholics and secularists got fuzzy as liberation theology became influential among Catholics. The governments offered amnesty to combatants and applied military force to those who refused. The military also protected development projects that provided schools, roads and medical clinics in rural areas. A more critical view suggests that power sharing was limited, only operating within part of Colombia. Large portions of the country remained contested and beyond the reach of government, whether Liberal or Conservative. Not only did the absence of the state in these areas mean that other political groups came to the fore, especially left-wing guerrillas like the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Co-

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lombia, or FARC) during the 1960s, it also gave space later on, in the 1970s and 1980s, to criminal groups, especially those producing and distributing drugs, to operate. This has led to the creation of networks between different political groups and criminal gangs as well as the acquiescence of the state to paramilitary organizations and their activity in regions of the country. The relative weakness of the civilian state undoubtedly contributed to the increasing independence and absence of scrutiny over the armed forces, including condoning of human rights violations. Between the early 1980s and the mid2000s, 50,000 people had been killed because of political violence while two million had been displaced and thousands “disappeared” (Avilés 2006, 1, 6). Under the National Front, Colombia made significant economic and social progress, including agrarian reform, expanding education, and developing an export economy. Women’s rights expanded, as did their economic opportunities. But the economic growth did not keep up with neighboring Venezuela, which was at the peak of its oil boom, and social progress was often slower than people thought they deserved. Along with the inspiration of the Cuban Revolution, this contributed to the rise of leftist guerrilla movements such as the FARC and the M-19. Colombia’s mountainous terrain and isolated pockets of discontent provide many good staging areas for guerrilla groups, and they have proven remarkably long-lasting even though they have never been close to overthrowing the Colombian state. The National Front as a legal agreement expired in 1974, but the Liberal candidate, Alfonso López, who won the 1974 election, kept the practice of sharing offices with the Conservatives. So, in practice, much of the National Front regime continued. López had run in 1962 as the candidate of the Liberal Revolutionary Movement (MRL), which opposed the National Front agreement. But he lost badly and the MRL returned to the Liberal Party in 1967. In 1974 he won the Liberal Party primary and then the presidential election by a wide margin. By this time, however, Colombia was not so sharply polarized along Liberal versus Conservative lines and other groups were emerging to mobilize a wider segment of the population. The economy had gone into a downturn, along with the rest of Latin America, and there was widespread social discontent. A national civic strike in Bogotá in 1977, mobilized by the Communist Party, the Revolutionary Socialist Union, and a faction of the Conservative Party, led to bloody rioting throughout the city. The Liberals won the presidential elections again in 1978 with Julio Turbay, who implemented a security statute giving the military increased powers to suppress revolutionary movements. The M-19 movement took over the Dominican Republic’s embassy during a diplomatic reception, and Turbay eventually let the guerrillas go into exile in Cuba, apparently with a $1 million ransom. In 1982, he lifted the state of siege, believing that the guerrilla movements had been sufficiently weakened.

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In 1982, the Conservative candidate, Belisario Betancur, narrowly won the presidency, with support from disgruntled Liberals. He reverted to the 50/ 50 power-sharing arrangement, in the hope of achieving greater national unity. Betancur negotiated a cease-fire with the two leading guerrilla groups, the FARC and the M-19, hoping to integrate their leadership into civilian political life. However, there was strong opposition to this policy from conservative militia groups who mobilized to attack any guerrilla leaders who integrated into civilian life. They accused the guerrillas of just using the cease-fire to rebuild their strength. One year before the end of Betancur’s term, the M-19 group stormed the Colombian Palace of Justice and took 300 people hostage, including 24 Supreme Court justices. They demanded that President Betancur come to the palace to stand trial before them. They also burned the legal archives which contained records that might have been used to prosecute many of them. Betancur refused to negotiate and sent in the army, leading to the deaths of more than 100 people, including twelve magistrates. This turned public opinion sharply against M-19, but also raised doubts about Betancur’s handling of the conflict. In 1986, the Liberal candidate, Virgilio Barco, won with 4.1 million votes, against 2.6 million for the Conservative candidate. A new feature was the participation of Jaime Pardo of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), a party organized by guerrillas who had transitioned to civilian politics. The UP won only 328,752 votes. UP candidates were targeted for assassination by members of anti-communist militia groups and over 1,000 were killed, including Jaime Pardo, who was assassinated in 1987. The assassinations were organized by some combination of anti-communist militias, drug syndicates and death squads within the military, but few were ever prosecuted. Some in the Liberal Party leadership concluded that the power-sharing regime was not working any more. President Virgilio Barco set up an administration entirely of Liberal Party politicians, but that was not enough of a change to inspire a shift in the country’s political system or direction. ARGENTINA Radical Hegemony, 1916–1929 After the long period of economic growth and social development known as the Golden Age, Argentina had Latin America’s largest urban working class and was ready to move into era of state development. In 1912, President Sáenz Peña, recognizing a need to make the electorate more inclusive, led a reform of the Argentine election system, making voting secret, universal and compulsory for male citizens over 18. The reform, supported by the conservative-dominated Congress, was intended to build an alliance with the mid-

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dle-class Radical Civic Union (UCR) and to undercut extra-parliamentary pressures from the emerging socialist left. However, the measure was more successful than they anticipated: the number of voters increased from 190,000 in 1910 to 1.4 million by 1928. In the 1916 election, Hipólito Yrigoyen of the UCR drew on this larger electorate to win with 46 percent of the popular vote against 26 percent for the combined conservative vote (Manzetti 1993, 31). Yrigoyen had the presidency, but the Senate was appointed by the provincial legislatures which were controlled by his opposition and which resisted his efforts to bring his supporters into government. He retaliated by declaring a state of emergency and intervening in the provinces. Yrigoyen’s government began a decade and a half during which UCR governments dominated Argentina, between 1916 and 1930. The base of the these governments’ political support was in the middle class, even though the leadership remained dominated by older elite interests in the commercial and landowning class. Although some efforts were made to bring the working class into the UCR by introducing labor legislation, its implementation was relatively patchy. In addition, despite a promise of cleaner government, Yrigoyen and his successor, Marcelo Alvear, relied on patronage and corruption similar to that used by previous conservative governments (Manzetti 1993, 31–32). At the end of his tumultuous first term in office, Yrigoyen observed the constitutional prohibition against re-election and allowed a less provocative member of his party, Marcelo Alvear, to run as candidate in the 1922 election. Alvear’s personal style made him more acceptable to the country’s establishment, but he appealed less to the frustrated middle and working classes. In 1928, Yrigoyen was overwhelmingly re-elected, but he was aging, and when the world depression hit in 1929 his aides protected him from reports on its impact. The Infamous Decade, 1930–1943 The world economic crash triggered by the Wall Street crash of October 1929 hit Argentina especially hard. The country was heavily reliant on demand for its exports; the economic downturn meant that it was unable to sell and national income fell. Eventually this led to redundancies not only in the agricultural sector but also the public sector. Congress was in turmoil in a political stalemate with the Radical Party president, Hipólito Yrigoyen. At a personal level, Yrigoyen, now aged 78, was not really up to dealing with the crisis. Organizationally, his party and the government he led was limited in its appeal. While the middle class–dominated UCR was certainly more representative than the conservatives in its social base, it had made few inroads

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into the growing working class. This constituency would have to wait for its advocate. In 1930 the military took the opportunity to seize power directly. Indirect elections were introduced as a way of defusing social tensions. The period became known as the Infamous Decade, largely because corruption and political repression were more blatant than in other periods and the federal government actively “intervened” to depose many provincial governments. It was a difficult period economically, because of the global recession, and many small farmers had to give up and move to the city. Politically, however, the opposition was growing stronger as the Radical Party formed a coalition with democratic progressives, communists, and socialists. The military was split between a hard-line group led by General José Uriburu and a soft-line group led by General Augustín Justo. Uriburu took the presidency after the coup, then indirect elections were held in 1932 and Justo was elected. The UCR, however, was prohibited from running candidates in the election. These elections naturally brought no real legitimacy to the Justo government, and he ruled by suppressing the opposition. When Yrigoyen died in 1933, all his flaws were forgiven and huge crowds filled the streets for his funeral. In 1938 the anti-Yrigoyen faction of the UCR was allowed to ally with the conservatives in the election of a civilian, Roberto Ortiz. He became ill with diabetes and his vice president, Ramón Castillo, took office. It seemed clear that the only way conservatives could win the 1943 election was through massive fraud, and even then they did not agreed on how to respond to US pressure to join the alliance in World War II. The civilian politicians sought a diplomatic balance between the Allies and the Axis. So a group of nationalist army officers overthrew the government, to widespread popular approval. They had no particular agenda other than disdain for corrupt civilian politicians, anti-communism and support for military autonomy. No one anticipated that the outcome of the coup was to make a colonel, Juan Domingo Perón, the dominant figure of Argentine politics for the next three decades. Perón, His Wives, and His Shadow, 1943–1976 Perón was not the leader of the 1943 coup, but he was part of the United Officers Group that organized it, and he was rewarded with the post of minister of labor and welfare. This was considered a minor position, but he used it to build links to working-class parties and organizations. Perón was quicker than others to recognize the importance of newly emerging social groups that were becoming more politically conscious and needed a leader. His essential insight was that leadership in Argentina required building a broad base of support that included the working class and the labor move-

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ment. When there was a massive earthquake in San Juan province in 1944, he moved quickly to mobilize relief efforts, winning considerably enhanced national prominence. When Perón’s mentor, General Edelmiro Farrell, became president, Perón was appointed vice president while retaining the labor portfolio. His rising popularity was threatening to some of the generals, and he was briefly pushed out of power and imprisoned in 1945. But this just increased his popularity and Perón won the 1946 presidential election by appealing to the masses when his opponents failed to do the same. He got a newly revised constitution passed in 1949, extending social rights, and then was re-elected under the new constitution in 1951. He called his political philosophy justicialismo, a word which might be translated as “justiceism” if such a word existed in English (it did not exist in Spanish either until the Peronists invented it). It sought to bridge the Cold War ideologies of communism and capitalism by providing social and economic redistribution without undermining the economic system which had generated the wealth (Adams 2010, 18). As a philosophy, it seems broad enough to encompass almost anyone, but its motivating force came from belief in the power of Perón as a personality. Perón was the kind of person that people either loved or hated, and those who challenged him on any point were suppressed, including many who were close to the Catholic Church. Perón’s first wife had died of uterine cancer at the age of 29, and in 1949 he had married Eva Duarte, a popular radio actress who was active in relief efforts for victims of the 1944 earthquake. He was 48 and she was 24, and her illegitimate birth, humble social origins, and media career shocked the traditional Argentine upper classes. But her passion and her vibrant personality were inspirational to wide segments of the Argentine population, and she became even more popular than Perón himself. In addition to her high visibility charity activities, she championed women’s suffrage and organized the Feminist Peronist Party within the Peronist movement. The new constitution was the first that allowed women to run for office, and a number were elected under the Feminist Peronist Party’s auspices in 1952. Evita, as she was generally known, wanted to run for vice president in the 1952 election. But there was strong opposition from male traditionalists, and she had to back off. Also, her health was declining and she died of cervical cancer at the age of 33. Enormous crowds of mourners for Evita filled the streets of Buenos Aires. Her body was embalmed and put on display and Perón planned to build a memorial to her which would feature a statue of a shirtless worker taller than the Statue of Liberty. But Evita’s death denied him an important political partner at a time when the country faced serious economic problems (Adams 2010). He had come into power at a time when the economy was buoyed by high European demand for agricultural products following the end

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of the Second World War. This gave him the revenue to fund social programs, but the demand for benefits kept increasing while international demand for Argentina’s products was cyclical. Perón involved the state in the development of trade to try to sustain international demand, but managerial inefficiency and corruption meant that agricultural production was being undermined by the early 1950s. Similar developments were occurring in the industrial sector, where investment was insufficient. Eventually, the economic downturn and political opposition by the military and the Catholic Church led to Perón’s overthrow by a military coup in 1955. The generals reinstated the 1853 constitution. Peronism was banned from 1955 to 1971 and it was illegal to have a photograph of Juan Domingo and Evita in one’s home. The monument to Evita had never been built, and her body mysteriously disappeared. Finally, in 1971, the military revealed that she had been buried in Italy and her embalmed body was returned to Perón, who was living in exile in Spain at the time. He and his third wife, Isabel, kept it on a platform in the dining room until Perón was able to return to Argentina in 1972. In 1973, he was elected president, with Isabel as his vice president. When he died in 1974, Isabel brought Eva’s body back to Argentina to be displayed briefly with his, then it was buried in the Duarte family tomb. Perón brought a new polarizing dimension to Argentine politics, surpassing the liberal-conservative divide and the divide between Buenos Aires and the provinces. The new divide was simply for or against Perón. This was the defining polarity of Argentine politics, regardless of whether he was in office or in exile. Even after his death and the return to democracy in 1983, the political system remained divided between supporters and opponents of Peronismo. This unresolved polarization over Peronismo meant that no one was able to hold office long enough or with enough support to establish a stable regime. Perón had formed the Justicialist Party in 1946, but its doctrines were nebulous; what held it together was loyalty to him. It was a powerful social movement, but its left- and right-wing factions didn’t really agree on much except loyalty to Perón and his wives. He was sometimes described as an anti-communist nationalist with fascist leanings, but his followers’ loyalty was to him as a man, not to any clearly defined philosophy. The military government allowed elections in 1958, but prohibited Perón or his supporters from running. Perón’s absence left organized labor without a political leader. Arturo Frondizi, the candidate of one of the splinters of the UCR, was elected. Frondizi tried to build a coalition of support, approaching both Peronists and leftists, which raised suspicion within the military (Dávila 2013, 62). He was deposed in a coup in 1962. After a series of coups, Peronists were allowed to run in 1973, and Perón returned to win a direct election, with the support of organized labor. But he was unable to unite a

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society increasingly polarized between the workers and an increasingly militarized conservative elite (Adams 2010, 150). He died in 1974, and the presidency went to his vice president, who was his third wife, Isabel Martinez de Perón. Isabel Perón has the distinction of being the first female president of the Americas. But, sadly, she had no qualifications other than her married name and was overthrown by the military in 1976. She continued to be supported by the right wing of the party, as a tactic in their violent pursuit of the left (Adams 2010, 290). The Dirty War, 1976–1983 This time the military decided to end political polarization once and for all by imposing what they called a “National Reorganization Process,” led by a series of four generals as president. This was justified with an anti-communist ideology that rationalized murdering thousands of students, labor leaders, intellectuals and activists. These measures succeeded in suppressing the revolutionary socialist groups that rose up to challenge the military regime, some of which came out of the Peronist movement. But the economy got worse and the public was offended by the corruption and the massive violations of human rights. Finally, the government decided to win mass support by driving the British out of the Malvinas or Falkland Islands. But when British prime minister Margaret Thatcher shocked them by sending the British fleet and an expeditionary force, the military incompetence of the Argentine armed forces was revealed. Public opinion turned decisively against the military and elections were called for 1983, with all parties allowed to participate. PERU The Aristocratic Republic, 1886–1919 Following the humiliation of losing the War of the Pacific, Peru was in need of some serious state building to guide its recovery. After a period of instability, with the presidency changing hands every few months, some stability came with the leadership of Andrés Avelino Cáceres, one of the generals who had led the war against Chile. Cáceres organized a Constitutionalist party aimed at restoring constitutional rule. The Constitutionalists formed an alliance with the Civilistas, who were eager to see electoral stability return, and he was unopposed in the 1886 election. The country was eager to settle down, and Cáceres served a full term until 1890, opening the period known as the Aristocratic Republic. There was a general consensus among the politically active groups that the country need to modernize and broaden its economic base rather than

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depending so heavily on guano. The country had products such as rubber, wool, cotton, copper and cotton which were quite marketable. And there were opportunities for manufacturing to serve the local market and perhaps even for export. The country had no good alternative other than to go back to the policies that Manuel Pardo had advocated before his assassination in 1876. Cáceres opened negotiations with the British to settle the country’s foreign debts in exchange for giving up control of the national railway network. The deal, known as the Grace Contract, was successful economically. The economy revived and the consortium invested heavily in the railroads. Sugar and cotton exports became more important than guano. But the Grace Contract was strongly opposed by nationalists led by Nicolás Piérola, who had served as “Commander in Chief of the State” from 1879 to 1881. The nationalists did their best to split the Constitutionalists and Civilistas. In 1890, Cáceres succeeded in getting his chosen successor, Remingo Morales, elected. But he proved a weak leader, largely following written instructions from Cáceres, who had gone to Paris on a diplomatic mission. When Morales died in 1894, the military intervened to give power to another Cáceres lieutenant, Justiniano Borgoño. The Civilistas were outraged by the military intervention and formed an alliance with Piérola’s Democrats. When Cáceres won the elections of 1895, the Democrats and Civilistas claimed fraud and there were acts of rebellion throughout the country. Cáceres recognized his lack of popular support and agreed to turn power over to Nicolás de Piérola. Fortunately, Piérola had matured since his period as “Commander in Chief of the State,” and he realized that the climate of opinion had changed. Positivist thinking had become influential in Peruvian social thought as it had in the rest of Latin America. At the end of his term, he was able to engineer the election of a man who would continue his policies, Eduardo López de Romaña, an engineer and Civilista. This was a period of considerable progress based on elite consensus about the need for modernization and development along capitalist lines. The country recuperated from the war and began to develop a more diverse economy. In many ways it was similar to the Porfiriato (1876–1910) in Mexico and the Golden Age (1880–1916) in Argentina. And like Mexico, Argentina and other countries in the Americas, it was heavily oriented towards elite interests during a period where new social and economic forces were emerging and organizing. But the failure of the Aristocratic Republic to incorporate these new groups into the political system would challenge it during the first half of the twentieth century, and ultimately seal its fate. Just as in Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, economic growth led to the growth of urban middle and working classes with rising expectations. In 1903, the constitution would have permitted Nicolás Piérola a second, non-

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consecutive term as president, but he was not re-elected. The Civilista party was divided between a younger generation that wanted more progressive changes and an older one that was more concerned with maintaining an orderly status quo. The rule of the aristocracy was challenged in the writings of a group of intellectuals known as the Generation of 1900 that sought to modernize the country. These Young Turks won, and their candidate, José Pardo (son of Peru’s first civilian president, Manuel Pardo) was elected in 1904. José Pardo wanted to accelerate social progress by enacting progressive legislation, including the right to organize labor unions, reducing working hours, and regulation of child labor. His reforms were adamantly opposed by conservative congressmen and were slow to be adopted. His was succeeded by his treasury minister, Augusto Leguía, who proved better at economic management than at political alliance building. There were abortive uprisings by Piérola’s Democrats and the newly organized Liberal party. In response to these uprisings, Leguía became more dictatorial, leading many of the Civilistas to defect. He tried to cancel the 1912 elections so as to stay in office, but there were mass uprisings organized by the Democrats under the charismatic leadership of Guillermo Billinghurst. Billinghurst was a wealthy entrepreneur and intellectual who thought the upper classes should make more concessions to the labor movement and the working class in order to preserve the capitalist system. He was a charismatic speaker who excited mass support but also appealed to the more enlightened members of the upper classes. He won the 1912 election with support from voters from a wide range of political parties, including Civilistas who had defected from Leguía. He moved quickly to implement many of the progressive measures that José Pardo had advocated. When he ran into the same kind of congressional opposition that Pardo had, he encouraged the workers to mobilize against Congress. He was apparently planning to shut down Congress and hold new elections, on the theory that Congress should be elected at the same time as the president. Establishment politicians were threatened by Billinghurst’s plans, or what they suspected were his plans, and urged the military brass to intervene. But before they could act, a young infantry officer named Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro mobilized an assault on the presidential palace and overthrew him. While Billinghurst’s advocates claim that he was overthrown because of his leftist policies, his detractors place the blame on his messianic complex and inability or refusal to work with the political aristocracy (Pike 1967, 201). Congress appointed a civilian-military junta to take temporary power, but the general in charge, Óscar Benavides, was eager to return to regular constitutional procedures. He called an inter-party convention to choose a candidate that all parties could support. Presided over by ex-president Andrés Cáceres, this convention agreed on José Pardo, who ran unopposed for his

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second term as president in 1915. Pardo was seen as a reliable and trustworthy member of the political aristocracy, but on a policy level his priorities were not much different from Billinghurst’s. He succeeded in actually implementing a law granting non-Catholics religious rights and an eight-hour day for manufacturing and extractive industry workers. The Oncenio of Leguía, 1919–1930 In 1919 the presidential election was won by Augusto Leguía. As dictatorial in temperament as he had been during his previous term in office, between 1908 and 1912, Leguía and his supporters could not wait for an orderly succession. They seized the national palace in a coup and sent President Pardo into exile. Leguía announced that he had come to “liquidate the old state of affairs” and to “detain the advance of communism” (Pike 1967, 217). His goal, beyond establishing himself as dictator, was to make the country safe for the advance of capitalism in much the same way that Billinghurst had attempted through democratic means. Rather than building a political party and persuading Congress to accept this goal, he simply suppressed the existing Congress and appointed a constituent assembly to establish a new one. He succeeded in staying in power for eleven years, a period which has become known as the Oncenio (eleven-year period) of Leguía. His repressive rule ended only when the economy crashed along with the global crash of 1929 and the army evicted him. Apristas versus anti-Apristas, 1930–1968 Having freed the country from the dictator, the military was once again calling the shots, but without any clear idea of what else they wanted to do. Peru was abuzz with controversy and debate about what should be done about the divide between the European civilization on the coast and the Indian civilization in the mountains. Should the Indians be modernized and incorporated into Western materialistic culture? Or should the Indians’ more spiritual values save the country from the inevitable decline of capitalism? Two thinkers were especially important in this debate, both creative thinkers whose ideas were rooted partly in Marxist thinking and partly in Peruvian nationalism. The first was José Carlos Mariátegui, a journalist and philosopher, who advocated a transition to a form of socialism rooted in South American, and particularly Indian, culture. But he had poor health and died at the age of 35 in 1930. The other important thinker was Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, who lived to be 83 and became the central figure in Peruvian politics for two generations. Haya de la Torre never became president of Peru, but not for lack of trying. Political competition from the 1930s to 1980s was largely shaped by

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Haya de la Torre and those resolutely conspiring to keep him out of office. This was not primarily an ideological dispute, because his opponents adopted many of his ideas, principally a greater role for the state in development and the incorporation of previously excluded groups into the polity, including the establishment of social programs. The case of Peru is therefore odd in the sense that transformative leadership rested with an individual who never attained the highest public office. This was also true in Chile during the era dominated by Diego Portales in the 1820s and 1830s, but Portales preferred to run things from behind the scenes. Haya de la Torre wanted very much to be president of Peru, but he had to be content with seeing others co-opt his policies in order to keep him out of office. Haya de la Torre was a charismatic speaker and political organizer, as well as a prolific writer and creative political thinker (Alexander, 1973). Born in 1895 to an aristocratic family in northern Peru, his physical features suggested some resemblance to the sculptured heads at Chan-Chan, a preInca archaeological site near his home. As a young man in 1917, Haya went off to study law at the university in Lima and got swept up in the university reform movement that was sweeping Latin America at the time. This brought him into conflict with the Leguía dictatorship and he was exiled in 1923. This gave him the opportunity to study the Mexican Revolution in Mexico and the Russian Revolution in Russia, as well as experiencing free market democracy in the United States and Western Europe. He travelled widely in the United States and Europe including Russia. While in Mexico, he joined with other Latin American students to form a party with region-wide aspirations, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, or APRA). Haya de la Torre’s global perspective was also incorporated in his writings, which incorporated Marxist thought, including that of José Carlos Mariátegui, but also Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, Arnold Toynbee’s theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, and even spiritualist thinking (Alexander 1973, Klaren 1973, Jorrín and Martz 1970, Pike 1986). His strength was not as a systematic scholar but as a journalist and essayist. His books were mostly compilations of his articles. This allowed him to shift his positions on controversial issues when conditions warranted without admitting to any contradiction with his writings. For example, he accepted the Leninist dictum that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, but then argued that for developing countries it was the first stage. This justified his joining with a right-wing party to support giving Standard Oil a contract to develop Peru’s oil resources. Haya de la Torre argued that Latin America (which he preferred to call Indoamerica) had to develop its own path to socialism, a position he shared with Mariátegui and other thinkers known as Indigenists. He saw that the working class in Indoamerica was not strong enough to lead a revolution,

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even in alliance with the Indians. He believed Latin America was still in a feudal condition, so he argued that the progressive alliance had to also incorporate the middle classes (Graham 1992, 26). Their support was important since they were also oppressed by the Yankee imperialist monopolies. This was not an unusual position; it was shared by the orthodox communist parties of the time throughout Latin America. Middle-class youth were the most enthusiastic recruits to his movement, which was also true of most other Latin American leftist movements. Haya de la Torre also learned organizational techniques from European political parties. APRA was Peru’s first mass participatory political party, perhaps the first in Latin America. It offered educational classes, sports leagues, chess clubs and all kinds of activities for members. It had songs and chants and secret codes. Members were loyal to the party and turned out for mass demonstrations and even armed actions when needed. This was different from Peru’s previous political parties, which were mostly electoral alliances between politicians and lobbyists. APRA inspired devotion from those who wanted change and fear from those who thought it might overturn traditional prerogatives (Graham 1992, 26). Haya de la Torre returned to Peru after the Leguía dictatorship was overthrown and ran for president in 1931. This put him up against Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro, the lieutenant colonel who overthrew Leguía in a coup in 1930. Sánchez Cerro was a challenging opponent. He was a small man physically, seldom weighing more than 120 pounds, but he was fierce. He had been wounded in five places and lost three fingers from his left hand when he grabbed the muzzle of a machine gun during the uprising against Billinghurst in 1914. He was dark skinned, even suspected of having a few drops of African blood. He was the first to bring a populist political style to Peru, appealing directly to the masses in colloquial Spanish. He was very popular in the sierra, the mountainous regions populated mostly by Indians and mestizos. In comparison, Haya de la Torre seemed like an overeducated aristocrat. The official election results showed Haya de la Torre narrowly losing to Sánchez Cerro. This was not an implausible result, but the apristas contested it and a group of them rose up in insurrection in Trujillo, Haya de la Torre’s birthplace. When the armed forces retook Trujillo, they found that the apristas had killed sixty officers. In revenge, they killed several thousand apristas, going door to door to seek out men whose shoulders or trigger fingers showed signs of having recently fired a rifle. This created bad blood between the military and APRA that was very long-lasting and destructive. The next forty years saw successive attempts to keep APRA from power and Haya de la Torre from the presidency. Over these years APRA itself underwent substantial ideological change. It had started out as both radical and confrontational, but its politics gradually shifted towards sympathy with

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reformism and a mixed economy. By the end of the period, the APRA program was very similar to the one that Sánchez Cerro’s own political organization, the Revolutionary Union, had advocated in the early 1930s. But similarity in ideas did not mean the parties could get along. In 1933, Sánchez Cerro was assassinated by an APRA member as he was reviewing troops for an undeclared war with Colombia. It was widely believed that the leadership of APRA was complicit, viewing it as revenge for the killings of their members by the military (Guerra 1984, 113). After the military put down the rioting after the assassination, Congress appointed Óscar Benavides to fill out his term. Benavides was a general and an aristocrat who at first released apristas from jail and legalized the party, but then illegalized them again. Haya de la Torre went into hiding in Peru for ten years, but he continued to be politically and intellectually active. For the 1939 elections, believing the military would never allow Haya de la Torre to take power, the APRA decided to support Manuel Prado, a conservative patriarch who agreed to legalize the APRA if he was elected. Prado was also reasonably successful and popular and the apristas moderated their views during the period because of their support for the United States and the Allies in World War II, and because the middle sectors in Peru were doing better economically than they had anticipated. In the 1945 elections, President Prado and APRA agreed to support José Luis Bustamente y Rivero, an attorney and professor of middle-class origins. The apristas thought that they would effectively rule from Congress, with Bustamente as a front man. And they had some success in supporting joint policies, including negotiating a contract with Standard Oil to develop Peru’s oil reserves. This highlighted the major shift that had taken place in aprista ideology, which had originally focused on opposition to Yankee imperialism. The oil deal was resisted by members of the aristocracy, including Benavides, as a sell-out of the national interest to foreign capital. Haya de la Torre was not able, however, to maintain discipline within APRA, and a leftist faction within the party led an attempted coup against Bustamante in 1948. Bustamante seemed to be overwhelmed with the political machinations in the country and retreated into academic work. Bustamante’s ineffectiveness and continual attempts by the left to disrupt or overthrow his government gave the military justification to intervene and he was replaced by Brigadier General Manuel Odría in 1948. Odría held office for two years as a military officer, then resigned for two months to run for president. He was elected in 1950 and served until 1956, making his presidency an ochenio, or eight-year administration. Haya de la Torre was forced to take refuge in the Colombian embassy when Odría refused to give him a safe conduct pass out of the country. He lived in the embassy for five years. Odría tried to model his regime on Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, and pushed his wife into the role of patroness of the poor

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modeled on Evita Perón. But the economy was in a downward phase of the economic cycle, and in 1956 Manuel Prado won the presidency with the support of APRA. As he promised, Prado opened up the political system for Haya de la Torre to run in 1963. But by this time APRA had lost a lot of its luster, and Haya got strong competition from Fernando Belaúnde Terry of the newly organized Acción Popular (Popular Action, or AP) party, which seemed more progressive. In the 1962 election, Haya de la Torre got 558,000 votes, Belaúnde Terry got 544,000, and Manuel Odría got 481,000. None had enough votes to win on the first round, so the election was thrown into Congress. The apristas made a deal to give the presidency to Odría, their long-term, right-wing enemy, rather than giving it to their progressive competitor, Belaúnde Terry. The military thought APRA would effectively rule the country because of their majority in Congress, so they intervened for a year and scheduled a new election that made Fernando Belaúnde president. Belaúnde offered a program of reform within a constitutional framework that appealed to the lower middle classes, precisely the stratum that had first been mobilized by APRA. By this time, APRA’s program seemed more conservative and many of its activists deserted APRA for AP. Others went into the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, a group that united disillusioned apristas with Trotskyists. Belaúnde persisted in carrying out a program of agrarian reform, community development and economic diversification, which was exactly what Haya de la Torre and the apristas had advocated for so many years. When Belaúnde’s term approached its end, it seemed Haya de la Torre might be destined to win the presidency. Military Revolution, 1968–1980 But the military had other ideas. Belaúnde was overthrown in 1968 by General Juan Velasco. The coup was directed more at preventing the risk of Haya de la Torre’s election than at deposing Belaúnde, whose term was coming to an end. Juan Velasco was one of eleven children born to the wife of a medical assistant in northwestern Peru. As a boy, he worked shining shoes. Then he stowed away on a ship, joined the army, and did very well on the exams for entrance to the military academy. His history reflects an evolution in the Peruvian army, which became more and more a middle-class institution as the country urbanized and modernized. While the military intervened to keep Haya de la Torre and the apristas from taking power, this was because APRA was viewed as part of a corrupt and stalemated political establishment. In terms of concrete policies, Velasco’s program was very similar to those of both APRA and AP. The central plank of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces was land reform to empower the peasantry and break the dominance of the

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traditional landed aristocracy. Congress was closed and political parties and the press were suppressed. Government-controlled labor unions were organized in all major sectors of the economy. Oil fields and mines were nationalized, to be run cooperatively by the workers. It was everything APRA had been advocating for decades, except for political democracy. The apristas were locked out of power and forced into clandestine opposition. What had served the military regime well in coming to power—not having to negotiate compromises with key political actors—began to work against them; they were unable to build political support for their project (Skidmore and Smith 2005). But the most fundamental problem was that the revolutionary policies did not work economically or socially. Productivity declined and few of the cooperatives could repay their debts. Reliance on food imports increased. Corruption and crime increased. National debt and inflation increased, exacerbated by massive purchases of Soviet armaments. Indigenous and peasant movements failed to be integrated into the corporatist structure of the political regime (Rice 2012, 116). In the decade that followed, elements of this rural left constituted the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement which challenged the Peruvian state. The result was widespread protests and general strikes in 1976 and 1977. The military government’s position was made worse by their subsequent repression of social groups, turning society against the regime as a whole (Skidmore and Smith 2005). Increasingly, the military government faced a choice: either abolish capitalism altogether and impose a Cuban-style system, or retreat from power. Under growing public pressure from widespread protests, the officers decided to return to the barracks. Velasco was replaced by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, a former economics minister. A constituent assembly was elected in 1978, with Haya de la Torre as the president. He signed a new constitution a few days before he died, in August 1978. VENEZUELA Restoration and Rehabilitation, 1899–1935 With the end of the Guzmán dictatorship, at the end of the nineteenth century, historians observe that “a fundamental turnaround began to take place in Venezuelan political life” (Tarver and Frederick 2005, location 1098). There was a stronger sense of national identity, along with a strengthened government bureaucracy. Cipriano Castro, a military officer from the highlands, was elected president in 1899, and a strong leadership group emerged around him that was determined to pull the nation together as a whole. Castro was not personally stronger than previous caudillos; his strength came from a

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strong group of supporters known as the Valencian Circle, who consolidated central power and forced many opposition leaders into exile. In 1908, Cipriano Castro’s vice president, Juan Vicente Gómez, seized power while Castro was abroad for medical treatment. Gómez was a caudillo much like Castro, and they were friends. Their difference was a struggle over power, not a conflict of ideologies or policy goals. Initially Gómez sought to turn back the dictatorial direction taken by his predecessor, although his vision was similarly restricted, since he viewed himself as the final arbiter of what the country required. Gómez thought that there was no real ideological difference between the two main political factions of the time, which were known as Yellow Liberalism and Nationalist Liberalism but were similar to equally vaguely defined Liberals and Conservatives. With intellectual support, Gómez sought relief from the political violence of the preceding century by excluding political parties from a real role in government. The political leadership around Gómez viewed the principal political choice as between centralization or anarchy and instability (McBeth 2008, Grindle 2000, 41). Between 1909 and 1916 Gómez sought to consolidate this position, but continued to feel insecure until Castro’s death in 1924. He carried out a project of building a strong national state, which included the creation of an army that was national rather than regional or committed to particular individuals. Gómez was made commander-in-chief of the military and served three terms as president, during the last of which he died in his sleep. The era of the regional caudillo was over, replaced by a strong national dictator. The years of consolidation enabled foreign investment and industry to grow, and the country was transformed from an agrarian one to oil production after 1918. By the time of Gómez’s death in 1935, Venezuela was the second-largest oil producer in the world (McBeth 2008). The revenue from the country’s vast petroleum resources provided tremendous funds for public works, the military and the expansion of the bureaucracy. A strong secret police force, known as La Sagrada, imprisoned, tortured and killed dissenters. In overseeing this change, Gómez was not directly responsible. But he was able to exploit it, ensuring that oil would be the basis of Venezuela’s economy and providing the state with the resources to co-opt support. Brian McBeth (2008, 377–78) notes that the historiography of Venezuela has portrayed Gómez’s regime as operating in a linear fashion, suggesting a logic of development. Yet this overlooks the significant levels of protest which occurred throughout the dictatorship, as they struggled to overthrow the regime. The principal opposition included former members of government forced into exile, young military officers, left-wing groups and members of a small and emerging middle class. Many of the former government members were those who felt excluded from playing a fuller role in determining the character of the political regime, especially in relation to the opportunities presented by the presence of oil revenue. In all, around twenty-

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five conspiracies and twelve invasions were attempted during Gómez’s rule, but Gómez’s reliance on loyal state presidents and the army, along with his use of peasant militias against the invaders, worked against them. He also cultivated good relations with foreign powers to gain their support and cut off any assistance to the rebel movements ranged against him. One exception to the foreign countries supporting Gómez was Mexico. Emerging from its own revolutionary experience, Mexico broke ties with Venezuela and provided a model to another opposition group: university students. They were inspired by the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and hoped to end the successors to the Guzmanato just as the Mexicans had ended the Porfiriato. This cohort became known as the Generation of 1928 after a February 1928 protest at the central university in Caracas. They never succeeded in overthrowing Gómez and many died in prison or went into exile. But they were more than ready to lead the nation in regime change when Gómez died in December 1935. The Generation of 1928 versus the Military, 1935–1958 General Eleazar López Contreras, who took power on Gómez’s death, began to relax the controls on independent political organization. He also used the slogan sembrar el petróleo, or sowing the seeds of oil, to emphasize using oil revenue to modernize the country. The political opening provided opportunities for a generation of activists who had led student protests against the Gómez dictatorship in 1928. They organized mass organizations such as labor unions, student and women’s organizations and professional organizations, as well as underground organizations with disciplined cell structures to resist the political police. In the 1940s they organized the political parties that dominated Venezuelan politics for the decades to come: the Acción Democrática (Democratic Action, or AD) and the Christian Democratic Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (Committee of the Independent Electoral Political Organization, or COPEI). COPEI had its origins among Catholic students during the 1930s and Catholic-oriented political parties (Grindle 2000, 44). The AD was based on secular organizations. However, in contrast to the earlier liberal and conservative parties during the nineteenth century, they were not identified with one particular economic group. Instead, they both recruited from and represented broader middle-class interests (Yepes 1981, 19). Alongside the emergence of AD and COPEI were leftist communist and non-communist parties, and the senior officers of the junta were reluctant to yield power and kept manipulating the rules to prevent a takeover by the new generation. That unwillingness prompted extreme resentment within AD, which was the biggest of the political parties at the time. Eventually, a new

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generation finally took office, in October 1945, through a coup d’état led by a group of younger military officers supporting AD. This group, under the leadership of Rómulo Betancourt (Alexander 1982), held power for three years of rapid democratic reform, a period that became known as the trienio. Betancourt was the leader of the AD and is sometimes called the Father of Venezuelan Democracy. He had been exiled for radical politics as a young man and settled in Costa Rica, where he became a leader of the Communist Party. But he resigned from the communists in 1937 and returned to Venezuela to build a democratic leftist party. He was working with Jorge Gaitán in Colombia on a plan to build an alliance of left-wing regimes in South America. Betancourt’s government promoted labor unions, oil nationalization and land distribution. They sought to prosecute corrupt officers of the previous government. This was all done in a democratic framework with full rights to the more conservative Catholic opposition, COPEI, during this period. These hopeful developments came crashing down in 1948. AD and COPEI became locked in a struggle with each other, leading them to seek support from other forces that did not share the commitment to democracy. In 1948 a military coup was launched with the support of the leaders of the COPEI who thought the military would correct the “excesses” of the AD government and likely put them in power. Instead, there were ten years of very oppressive dictatorship under the head of the military junta, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, perhaps the most ruthless leader in Venezuelan history. The Punto Fijo System, 1958–1988 The dictatorship lasted until student rioting in 1958 led to a unified opposition movement, with support from the air force and navy, forcing Pérez Jiménez into exile. Hoping to avoid repeating the error that led to the coup of 1948, the major parties agreed that democratic stability was essential and that the results of a free election the next year should be honored by all, and that all should share in the spoils of office. This agreement came to be known as the Punto Fijo system, named after the house in Caracas where representatives of the major parties met to work it out. It did not involve a formal alternation of the two major parties, as in the National Front in Colombia, but it did involve power sharing. The results of elections were to be honored, but the winning party was to give positions of power to the leaders of the other party so as to have a national unity government. The problem with this arrangement, as in Colombia, is that it was an arrangement between political elites that didn’t require them to open up to other groups. They thought it would be helped by the fact that the country had a strong flow of revenue from oil exports that would enable them to give out a lot of patronage. This system is sometimes called a “pacted” democracy

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or “limited pluralist polyarchy” (Grindle 2000, 45; McCoy and Myers 2006, 3), in which the president was the paramount figure owing to his position as party boss and his ability to dispense institutional and economic benefits. Not everyone was happy with this agreement, including many young activists who had risked their lives in the struggle against Pérez Jiménez. They wanted something more revolutionary than a return to what they disdained as bourgeois democracy. They were inspired by the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, and launched rural and urban guerrilla movements. They united in an attempt to prevent the elections scheduled for 1963, arguing that participating in the elections was giving endorsement to an exploitative capitalist system. The public was not ready to abandon its “illusions” about democracy, and the insurgents, failing to win mass support, resorted more and more to sabotage and terrorism. Their most egregious miscalculation came in September 1963, when they attacked a train carrying national guardsmen and threw the wounded men from the train. First-aid kits had been removed from the train, which was also carrying women and children. Public opinion rallied decisively behind the electoral process, despite threats from the guerrillas against anyone who voted. Raúl Leoni of the AD won the election, and continued the work of the Betancourt administration. Presidents under the Punto Fijo accord included Rómulo Betancourt (1959–1964), Raúl Leoni (1964–1969), and Rafael Caldera 1969–1974). Betancourt, who had led the progressive government for the trienio from 1945 to 1948, found that the treasury was empty and that oil prices were down, so he had to devote much of his presidency to achieving fiscal solvency rather than making the kind of social advances he would have liked. He formed a close relationship with the Arab oil-exporting nations to try to raise oil prices. His successor, Raúl Leoni, also a member of the Generation of 1928, had been Betancourt’s labor minister from 1945 to 1948, and he carried out some of the projects Betancourt had not been able to realize, including some heavy industrial development, starting a workers bank, road construction, and reforms to social problems. In 1969, the presidency was won by Rafael Caldera, a founding member of COPEI, which was the first peaceful transfer of power from one party to another in Venezuela’s history. His narrow victory was only possible because the AD party had split, but it solidified the principle of alternation of parties. He had a doctorate from the faculty of law and political sciences, spoke a number of languages, and taught courses in both law and sociology. He also ran several times for the presidency before finally winning in 1969. His economic policies were much the same as those of the two preceding presidencies; his foreign policy differed in that he rejected the Betancourt Doctrine, which denied Venezuelan recognition to the non-democratic na-

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tions in the hemisphere. He also gave an amnesty to guerrilla fighters who had been fighting for a Cuban-style regime. By the end of Caldera’s term in 1974, Venezuela’s semi-democracy seemed consolidated. Thanks to oil, the country had a lot more money than any of the other Latin American countries, and it had avoided military dictatorship during the 1960s and 1970s. The revolutionary left had been effectively suppressed, thanks in large part to Venezuela’s geography, which did not give the revolutionaries the kind of mountain retreats they had in Colombia. The electoral system provided for alternation of power between political parties with regular elections. But the oil wealth was a mixed blessing, as it had been to many countries. People thought of themselves as residents of a wealthy country, and felt entitled to more benefits than the revenues could actually pay for. Industrial development was not profitable when the prices of imports were low due to an overvalued currency. Corruption was often tolerated because people thought the country could afford it. And the political party system became ossified as the leaders of the two dominant parties made it difficult for younger individuals to gain office. Meanwhile, within society there was little space for new groups and movements to gain access to the political parties (McCoy and Myers 2006, 6–7). As long as oil prices were high, these problems could be managed. A major crisis loomed if oil revenues ever went down, but only inveterate worrywarts thought about that when the global crisis of 1973 caused prices to shoot up. In 1974, Carlos Andrés Pérez of the AD won the presidency and used the increased flow of oil money to fund massive development projects, as well as nationalizing the petroleum and iron industries. Actually, he went beyond using the petroleum dollars and borrowed huge amounts of money, driving up the national debt. The flood of imports, financed by petroleum dollars, tended to suppress the indigenous economy. By the end of his term, Venezuela was importing 80 percent of its food and Pérez was viewed as profligate and irresponsible by many, even including his mentor Rómulo Betancourt. However, the tendency to use oil revenue in the short term, rather than investing it for a rainy day, were hallmarks of successive Venezuelan presidencies. When revenues fell as a result of declining oil prices, Venezuelan presidents would continue to finance public spending through borrowing (Adams 2010, 357). In 1978 the COPEI candidate, Luis Herrera Campins, won the election. Confident that oil prices would remain high, Herrera continued Pérez’s spending and borrowing policies, while also bringing corruption charges against Pérez. When oil prices crashed in 1981, voters turned against him and returned more AD members to Congress. By this time, the alternation of political parties was well accepted, but the focus of concern was no longer establishing democracy. It was about coping with the economic crisis, much

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of which the public blamed on corruption which it had generally tolerated during the boom period. The fall in oil prices meant that Venezuela’s foreign debt was more burdensome, prompting the government to devalue the currency in 1983, the first time it had done so in two decades. For McCoy (2006, 266), this heralded the moment that the Punto Fijo system began to deteriorate. Yet this was not felt immediately; the two main political parties continued to dominate, with Andrés Pérez being re-elected to the presidency in 1988, in an election with 24 candidates. The stage was set for something new in Venezuela, but what it would be was unclear. CHILE The Presidential Era, 1925–1963 As we saw in the last chapter, the 1891 civil war led to a period known as the Parliamentary Republic, which worked for a stable country dominated by an aristocratic elite. But it was ill-suited for dealing with the demands of the emerging middle and working classes as the economy developed and Chile became more integrated into the global system. The 1920 presidential election was won by Arturo Alessandri, the charismatic son of an Italian immigrant who had gone to law school and become active in the Liberal Party. As the candidate of the Liberal Alliance, he was supported by the middle class and an emerging working class that had been a growing presence during the previous decade. His election promised a “democratization” of Chile’s existing institutions and he quickly moved to introduce a labor code and social welfare program (Skidmore and Smith 2005, Galdames 1941). Alessandri promised social reforms and succeeded in getting significant legislation passed, but the conservative opposition and allied elements from the military kept pressuring him to put their men into key ministries. Alessandri threatened to resign, then went into temporary exile in protest. The maneuver succeeded for him, when it had not for Jânio Quadros in Brazil, because he had strong popular support. The temporary military junta that had taken power in his absence realized that it did not have the necessary military or civilian support to rule the country in his absence. He returned to office and named a commission to write a new constitution, which was approved by referendum in 1925. The new constitution strengthened the role of the president, establishing a six-year term with no immediate re-election. Alessandri encouraged the middle classes to play a greater electoral role alongside younger officers in the army who gave his government and its reforms their blessing. His successor, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, supported military intolerance towards the opposition and the left, both during his first presidency in 1929–1931 and his second in 1952–1958. Ibañez was forced out in 1931 following the economic

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downturn of the Great Depression and widespread protests against his harsh rule. Among those opposed to Ibañez and his successor were Marxist sympathizers in the armed forces who intervened to establish a Socialist Republic of Chile in 1931. But it lasted for only twelve days before they were pressured to return to elections (Adams 2010, 206). In 1932 Arturo Alessandri was re-elected and completed a full term. But he soon became alienated from the activist labor and agrarian groups which he thought were pushing him too far, and adopted a harsh line against demonstrators. His second-term popularity was enhanced by an increase in world demand for Chilean exports, especially minerals, which contributed to an improved balance of payments even as inflation continued to rise and wages grew too slowly (Skidmore and Smith 2005, 119–20). While Chile embarked on a superficially stable period of regular elections that lasted until 1973, Alessandri’s problems with the left showed that beneath the surface there were growing tensions and splits and groups that felt excluded. There were multiple political parties, but they tended to coalesce into three major electoral coalitions: left, right and center. The 1958 election saw Jorge Alessandri, Arturo’s son, elected with 31.6 percent of the vote. He was the candidate of the right-wing coalition. Salvador Allende, the leftist candidate, got 28.9 percent and Eduardo Frei Montalva, the centrist, got 20.7 percent. Since no candidate got 50 percent, the election went to Congress, which elected Alessandri. The tradition was for Congress to anoint the candidate with the largest plurality of votes, but this was not legally required. If senators supporting two coalitions joined together and agreed on one of their candidates, they could vote him into office. So long as the policies advocated by the candidates were not too different, and the groups could work together after the election, the three-way split between left, center and right seemed to work. But in Chile, the extremes on both the left and right seemed to be gaining ground, while the center had trouble working with either of them. This polarization became more evident as the Cold War became a growing reality in Latin America, especially following the success of the Cuban Revolution and its growing appeal on the left. The Chilean Communist Party, the largest in Latin America outside Cuba, grew in strength, as did the Chilean Socialist Party, which was often more radical than the Communists. The Revolution in Liberty, 1964–1973 In 1964, things seemed to be going well when the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei was elected with 56 percent of the vote, against 39 percent for the Socialist Party candidate, Salvador Allende, and smaller percentages for the conservative candidates. Although the Christian Democrats were the center party, it went along with the movement in the country that was sympathetic

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to finding a “middle way” between capitalism and socialism. Frei and his party were becoming more and more open to leftist ideas, and the parties to his left were eager to push him in that direction. His government took up leftist notions of social reform and inclusion of broader segments of the population in governance. The Frei administration began many reforms in health, education, and housing. He encouraged unionization, especially of agrarian workers, and exerted stronger national control over the copper industry. Frei’s policies moved Chile moderately to the left, but not enough to satisfy the increasingly militant leftist opposition. Although the Frei government introduced many reforms, they were never enough to be an existential threat to powerful interest groups. For example, land reform amounted to a smaller figure than promised while his compromise solution to copper nationalization—where the government became a part owner of the predominately foreign companies—generated limited increases in production and revenue (Skidmore and Smith 2005, 125–26). In the 1970 election, the Socialists, Communists, Radicals, and several smaller leftist parties united in the Popular Unity coalition and again nominated Salvador Allende of the Socialist Party for president. They were unwilling or unable to create a united front with the Christian Democrats, even though the Christian Democratic candidate, Radomiro Tomic, was a politician from the party’s progressive wing whose campaign platform was almost identical to Allende’s. Allende won a plurality in the presidential election with 36 percent of the vote, against 34 percent for the conservative Jorge Alessandri and 27 percent for Radomiro Tomic. Thrown into Congress to decide the outcome, the Christian Democrats honored the tradition of supporting the leading candidate and voted for Allende to assume the presidency. That support was aided by Allende’s promise that he would work with the centrist parties in Congress and not destroy Chile’s democratic political institutions. Once in the presidency, Salvador Allende was faced with a historic choice. He could continue the reform path Eduardo Frei had initiated. Or he could try to institute more radical changes leading to a fundamental break with capitalism. The hope of many was that the new regime would incorporate the best features of the Cuban socialist economy, providing full employment and free health care, with respect for human rights and democratic practices. It was an exciting time, and many hoped that Chile would prove to the world that socialism was compatible with democracy and respect for human rights. There was much support in the country for this vision. Allende won unanimous consent in Congress for the nationalization of Chile’s major export industry, copper mining. The government also expanded many social programs from the previous regime and continued redistributing income to the poor.

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Given the essentially three-way division in Congress, any major reforms within the democratic system would require the support of the Christian Democrats along with the Popular Unity parties. But this could change; the Popular Unity hoped to increase its vote in the midterm congressional elections, winning a majority in Congress. To this end, and to respond to the human needs of its constituents, the Allende government supported increased wages and social benefits, while instituting price controls to try to control inflation. But they had bad luck when world copper prices went into a slump, and there simply was not money to pay for everything they tried to do. So inflation skyrocketed as they printed money to pay their bills, and businesses found it more and more difficult to function profitably. Running the copper industry, and other nationalized industries, proved more difficult and less profitable than they anticipated. Whenever a policy runs into difficulty, its supporters are likely to polarize into two opposite factions. One faction seeks to admit mistakes and back away from them. The other faction insists that the policies failed because they weren’t implemented firmly enough or purely enough. The Chilean Popular Unity coalition divided along these lines. The Communists and Radicals tended to favor moderation and compromise with the center. Allende was sympathetic to this moderate approach, but he could not persuade his own Socialist Party to go along. The Socialist Party and groups to its left kept pushing to nationalize or collectivize more and more businesses and farms, arguing that the capitalist system was fundamentally flawed and had to be replaced with a socialist system like the one in Cuba. This radicalized the opposition, not only in the armed forces, but among groups such as truck drivers, physicians, farm owners and small businessmen. Rather than uniting with the Christian Democrats on a more moderate policy, the Popular Unity mobilized against them. Former president Eduardo Frei, the leading figure in the Christian Democratic Party, had been elected to the Senate and he became the leader of the opposition to Allende. By early 1973, inflation had reached 800 percent a year and the economy was crippled by a wave of strikes by groups opposed to the government and by destabilizing measures from the US government. Socialist Party leader Carlos Altamirano ruled out any compromise with the Christian Democrats and urged the workers to prepare for armed struggle. With the Chilean Congress one of the strongest in the region, it was able to challenge and block Allende’s agenda, especially as Allende did not command a majority. The polarization of political forces and an inability to negotiate between the political forces over a growing conflict over what direction the country should take, undermined the regime (Siavelis 2000, xii). The Popular Unity parties did win an increased vote in the midterm elections, but not enough to control Congress without allies from the center.

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Allende, for his part, aimed to reform Chile’s political institutions: he proposed a unicameral legislature, but this was rejected by Congress. Congress also prevented him from ruling by decree, as Latin American presidents often do, in response to the social and economic emergency that worsened as leftists sought to take over farms and factories and rightists, supported by funds from the US government, shut down crucial services with strikes. Adams (2010, 215) observes that Allende’s efforts made the right fearful while failing to satisfy the left. On September 11, 1973, the Chilean military ended almost fifty years of presidential democracy. Salvador Allende declined an offer of free passage to go into exile and broadcast a farewell speech to the Chilean nation. He died in the besieged presidential palace, probably from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The coup and its aftermath ensured a posthumous legacy for Allende as a symbol of the quest for a more just and equitable society. Today, there is a statue of him on the square in front of the presidential palace where he died, and he is admired for his principled aspirations. When democracy returned to Chile, however, it was under the auspices of a political coalition—the Concertación—which included Christian Democrats as well as the Popular Unity parties in its leadership and which followed moderate redistributive policies. CONCLUSION In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the American republics were challenged by new economic and social forces that demanded recognition of their identity and rights. The global economic crisis of 1929 was a powerful shock that hit all the countries and accelerated this process. But changes took place at other times as well, depending on the internal political dynamics in each country. The process of expanding and developing the state to meet the demands of wider groups continued until the second half of the twentieth century when many leaders argued that the state bureaucracies and programs had become too expensive and too restrictive of free market initiative. In every country there was resistance to the leaders who sought to expand and develop the state. In the United States there was especially strong resistance from the white population in the South. The federal government and the institution of the presidency were weak and exhausted by the war effort and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. There was little energy for the task of reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln might have done better had he not been assassinated, but it may be that his legacy would have been sullied by an inability to overcome resisting forces.

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Strong presidential leadership in the United States finally reemerged with the William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson presidencies. These began building the capacity of government institutions and using them to regulate the economy and expand American influence in the rest of the world. The emphasis was more on building urban corporate and industrial capacity, resisted by rural populists, than on incorporating labor or other excluded groups. The New Deal regime, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election in 1932, moved vigorously to incorporate labor and to fight poverty. Roosevelt did this for practical, pragmatic reasons, not out of an ideological conviction. He was actually elected on a platform that promised a balanced budget. It succeeded over fierce ideological resistance from Republican small government traditionalists because the dimensions of the economic crisis demanded it. After World War II there were pressures to return to isolationism and cut back on the state, as the United States did after World War I, but the Cold War with the Soviet Union took precedence. The civil rights movement, and the need to present a better image to the Third World in the ideological struggle with communism, led the Kennedy and Johnson administrations to take more effective steps to fully incorporate Americans of African descent into the polity. The global crisis of 1930 hit Brazil particularly hard because the coffeewith-milk regime, dominated by the traditional upper classes in the major states, had long used state subsidies to avoid adjusting to market realities. This simply could not be afforded after 1930. The electoral system could not cope with the changes that needed to be made because the electorate was too small and the honesty of elections was not trusted. So in 1930 power was seized by a charismatic Machiavellian, Getúlio Vargas, who dominated Brazilian politics until his suicide in 1954, after which it was dominated by his ghost. The military forced a return to democracy in 1946, to keep up appearances in keeping with global trends, but Vargas continued to be the dominating force in the country and was elected to the presidency in 1950. The statist institutions created by Vargas dominated Brazilian economic life for the rest of the century and even into the current period (Almeida 2014). The Goulart government tried to move the country significantly to the left in 1963, based on a serious misjudgment of political possibilities in the country at the time. This led to the military coup of 1964, a coup which might have been avoided with more competent presidential leadership. The coup was intended to suppress revolutionary groups, but not to change the fundamental economic model. The military governments retained the economic and administrative infrastructure inherited from the Vargas regime. The shift to neoliberal policies began only after the return to democracy.

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In Mexico, state infrastructure was expanded during the Porfiriato when government was dominated by a dictator and his technocrats. But the Porfiriato was concerned exclusively with advancing business and elite interests, not with incorporating the masses. The transition to a new presidency that might have extended state capacities was tragically botched by the senile illusions of the aging dictator. So the Porfiriato was followed by the period known as The Revolution, a chaotic and bloody struggle between caudillos, peasant leaders, military officers, and anyone else who had a desire for power or a vision for the future. After millions of lives were lost, the country settled down to build a single party–dominated system that incorporated the major interest groups in a corporatist arrangement. This human tragedy could have been avoided if Díaz had understood and acted on the need for an orderly transition to a new regime. During this period, Latin America’s liberals and conservatives came to understand that they had more in common than they had differences. Colombia began an interesting experiment in power sharing between the Liberals and the Conservatives. A similar effort was made in Venezuela with the Punto Fijo system that effectively shared power between the two major parties of the time, one secular (AD) and one Catholic (COPEI). The problem with these arrangements was that both were essentially power-sharing arrangements among elites, without sufficient effort to incorporate new generations and new forces. In Venezuela oil wealth was used to buy off and placate discontented groups, but the cost of doing this grew beyond the oil revenues even when prices were high, and it became impossible when prices declined. Peru was gifted with some very thoughtful and creative leaders including Andrés Avelino Cáceres, José Pardo, Guillermo Billinghurst and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre. These leaders had some good proposals for much needed state development to diversify the economy, incorporate the emerging working class, and integrate the Indoamerican population in the highlands. But they were repeatedly blocked, in some cases by conservative opposition, but more frequently by political opponents who refused to follow electoral rules of the game. The considerable intellectual and organizational resources of APRA, and its leader Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, were suppressed by opponents who then went on to try to implement their ideas. The triumph by Fidel Castro in 1959 captured the imagination of a whole generation of Latin American youth, many of whom wanted to abandon bourgeois democracy for a Leninist one-party state. Their movements did not win power anywhere except Nicaragua, and even there they were forced to abandon the Leninist project. But these armed movements legitimized interventions by military and other right-wing forces in many countries. In Chile, where the Christian Democrats and most of the Popular Unity parties had reached a substantial agreement on progressive state-building policies, unre-

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alistic aspirations from the revolutionary left provided an excuse for a very repressive military coup. This was another tragedy that might have been avoided with more realistic presidential leadership. A parliamentary system would have forced Popular Unity to unite with the Christian Democrats to hold a majority. The presidential system gave Salvador Allende considerable legal powers but without the popular or congressional support to rule effectively. Presidents who tried to stop the tide of history, such as Augusto Leguía in Peru, inevitably failed. The emerging working class had to be accommodated in one way or another. In many Latin American countries, the European model of a corporatist state was attractive. These institutions provided advantages for the most advanced workers, the group sometimes known as the labor aristocracy, but large masses of workers were left at the margins. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal moved in the same direction as labor unions were legalized and government agencies were created to conduct representation elections. But in the United States, labor and its demands were subsumed into a wider political movement which had emerged in the late nineteenth century against the excesses of corporate power: the progressive movement. It was initially harnessed by Theodore Roosevelt through greater regulation and subsequently in the 1930s through FDR’s New Deal. The focus on “trust-busting” and regulation in the United States arguably demonstrated the extent to which labor remained a more peripheral political actor as compared to consumers more generally; it may also explain in part why the United States failed to see the creation of an explicit labor-based political party. By contrast in Chile and Colombia, labor was a more visible presence and presidents like Alessandri and López in the 1920s and 1930s sought to try and accommodate their demands through labor codes and working conditions. However, in both cases they were unable to use their relationship with labor to build a wider political base for themselves. The creation of new political institutions through the corporatist state involved considerable political innovation. And in some countries—Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico—it heralded a sharp break with the past. In Brazil and Argentina the model became synonymous with a particular individual, Getúlio Vargas and Juan Perón, respectively. In Mexico, although corporatism owed much to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, it became institutionalized within a dominant political party, subsequently known as the PRI. The corporatist state that emerged was distinct for at least two reasons. First, the leader-follower relationship became more explicit, owing to the formal representation of new social and economic groups. However, it is important to note that the relationship between the state and the represented groups was not an equal one. It was largely authoritarian and dominated by the government in a top-down fashion. In this respect Latin American cor-

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poratist states were broadly similar to those of southern Europe (e.g., the Italian, Portuguese and Spanish states established under Mussolini, Salazar, and Franco, respectively), to which they owed their inspiration. This was in contrast to the expansion of the American state under Theodore Roosevelt a couple of decades earlier which had built on the democratic tradition in American political development since the 1820s. Second, the Latin American corporatist state required a strong administrative structure once national consolidation had been realized and local and regional contestation had been overcome. That was helped in great part by wider economic changes which had occurred in the preceding decades. For much of Latin America during the middle part of the nineteenth century, power was concentrated in local and regional landlords based on land ownership and political machines to control the local population, especially tenant farmers. This changed with the rise of new economic sectors, including mineral extraction, guano mining, oil production, manufacturing, and light (and subsequently heavy) industry. These sectors were staffed by workers, many of them either migrants or their children, who owed little to the landlords. In addition, the new sectors provided resources for the central government in the form of taxes, enabling it to strengthen its position. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that the period of state building is associated with some of the most prominent presidents in the Americas. The three leadership responses—opposition, integration into the existing system or hierarchic state corporatism—remained in place even as the global and regional context changed after 1945. All three of these approaches were contested by advocates of Cuban-style socialism. This struggle continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and even beyond, as opposition to liberal democracy by revolutionary groups made it easier for conservatives to justify suppressing electoral democracy. Some leaders tried to suppress leftist movements with authoritarian measures; others sought to make the existing system more equitable through greater redistribution. Presidents who sought to follow this road included Jorge Alessandri and Eduardo Frei in Chile, Juscelino Kubitschek in Brazil, Rómulo Betancourt and Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela, Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Hipólito Yrigoyen in Argentina, and several Peruvian leaders inspired by Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre. In the United States the Great Society initiated by Lyndon Baines Johnson was broadly in line with this trend. However, in most of these cases governments found it very difficult to manage the raised expectations and there was considerable subsequent disappointment. With the left hoping to use this frustration to initiate a revolutionary socialist transformation, right-wing repression took control in Argentina, Mexico, Colombia and Venezuela, the latter two descending into virtual civil wars in the immediate post-1945 period.

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Other leaders, including Salvador Allende in Chile, João Goulart in Brazil and Juan Velasco in Peru, sought a more direct and explicitly socialist approach. But like their more centrist predecessors, they were not only unable to deliver the economic progress they promised, but faced considerable opposition from both domestic conservative elites and the US government. The result was often severe political polarization and the forcible removal of (civilian) governments by military ones. The global decline of socialism, at least in its Soviet, Chinese and Cuban forms, did not mean an end to the dominance of the state. The state remained a dominant actor in the hemisphere’s politics, economy and society after the 1960s. But as we shall see in the next chapter, it was to come under ideological and economic challenge.

Chapter Seven

Presidential Leadership in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization

Resistance to the expansion of the developmental state became more and more insistent in the 1970s and 1980s. This was not because its tasks were complete; there was still much that could have been done to expand health, employment and welfare services to marginalized populations. But the most politically powerful constituencies had been accommodated, and the costs of providing services were mounting. In many cases, these costs were paid for with domestic and international borrowing and by inflating the currency. After the oil embargo of 1973, the petroleum-exporting countries in the Middle East had a lot of excess capital to lend, and leaders of the American republics found it tempting to borrow rather than increase taxes to pay for expanding services. But payments had to be made on these debts, and that became especially difficult when the economies cycled down. Many countries were insolvent by the 1980s, a problem which became known as the Third World debt crisis. Conservative intellectuals and politicians mounted an influential critique of government spending as inefficient and a drag on the private sector. This was a global phenomenon, often associated with the leadership of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. The claim was made that cutting tax rates, especially on wealthy entrepreneurs, would stimulate the economy so much that tax revenues would actually increase. While this theoretical possibility didn’t actually work out in practice, it provided a rationale for cutting taxes, especially on businesses and wealthy individuals. In Latin America, this perspective was denounced as “neoliberalism” by its opponents. Advocates of these reforms usually didn’t call them neoliberalism, they used terms such as privatization, deregulation and market161

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friendly economics. One particularly influential book published in Peru denounced the “Perfect Latin American Idiot” who advocated unrestrained borrowing and inflation (Mendoza, Montaner and Vargas Llosa 2001). Advocates of market-friendly economics argued that economic growth would come by freeing capitalists from the burdens of excessive government regulation. They argued that international trade and foreign direct investment were good things that would contribute to economic growth, not exploitative imperialist tools that kept the Third World in poverty. Despite the protests of advocates of “commonsense” economics, the term “neoliberalism” was widely used and we have used it in this book. But it actually refers to a number of different policies, some of which worked better than others. On one extreme were “shock programs” such as that implemented by the Chilean military government after the 1973 coup. This proved too severe even for the Chilean military and was quickly changed to a much more gradual and successful reform. The budgetary and currency reforms in Brazil under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, which the opposition denounced as neoliberal, actually improved the welfare of the poorest Brazilians. Cardoso called his reforms “social democratic” and denied that they were “neoliberal,” a term he associated with the shock programs and Margaret Thatcher. Of the eight countries studied, these arguments had the easiest reception in the United States because the ideological roots of “free market economics” were deep in the United States. The principle of a small government and free trade had been a powerful force in American politics since the early years of the republic. The turn towards neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s was seen as a return to American values. The United States also had more economic reserves to deal with the problems the new policies created. By contrast, neoliberalism in much of Latin America was often perceived as foreign and involved structural readjustment at a time when many of the countries in the region were facing rising public debts and economic stagnation. Across Latin America economic neoliberalism coincided with growing protests and demands for political liberalization. This affected all states in the region, whether military dictatorships (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru) or “pacted” and exclusionary civilian regimes (Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia). Yet neoliberalism did not win without a struggle, and democratization did not overcome the economic challenges of the debt crisis of the 1980s—the “lost decade.” In several countries, political protests and the emergence of new social movements led to the election of presidents critical of neoliberalism and supportive of a more statist developmental approach, such as Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Nestor Kirchner in Argentina and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in the so-called “pink tide” in the 2000s. But by 2016 these governments were in grave crisis.

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THE UNITED STATES The Reagan Revolution, 1980-2008 By the mid-1970s a process of political and electoral realignment was underway. The electoral beneficiary of that process was Ronald Reagan, who won the presidential election in 1980. Reagan’s Republican Party stressed a resurgence of what is known in the United States as conservatism. But what was the character and ideology of this conservatism? Historically, conservatives have been perceived as a reactive force, opposed to change. This was the default position for many conservatives during the New Deal and Great Society era which spanned the period from the 1930s to the 1970s. Ideologically though, this conservative movement was committed to the primacy of capitalism and the market, aspects of which may be more commonly associated with “classical liberalism,” or neoliberalism. The belief in markets and private actors (principally for profit) as the way to organize economic activity has a long history. But it had been largely drowned out by the Progressive and New Deal regimes which expanded the role of the federal government in regulating business and providing welfare services. By the early 1970s questions were being raised about the effectiveness of this model among monetarist scholars and the political right. Increased spending on the Vietnam War and public services along with rising oil prices (especially after the 1973 Arab boycott) led to inflation and a recession. At the same time, the US economy was relatively uncompetitive, partly because of the dollar’s overvaluation, prompting President Nixon to abandon the fixed exchange rate in 1971 in an effort to correct it (O’Brien and Williams 2013). For conservatives the answer lay in paring back the state, reducing its size and scope. They argued that this would slow down a rise in national debt and encourage more efficiency through the use of the market and private business. In addition, attitudinal change was taking place across the United States. Conservatives rejected the New Deal and Great Society as inducing welfare dependency and social degeneration. These social conservative sentiments were especially visible among evangelical Christian groups—the Moral Majority—who were identified and exploited by the Republican Party as a potential political constituency, both in the 1980 election and the decades which followed. Indeed, by the end of the 1980s and during the 1990s, the Democratic Party repositioned itself to accommodate the turn towards the market, thereby reducing any differences between them and the Republicans to social rather than economic issues. Ronald Reagan’s record between 1981 and 1989 has been pored over by historians and opinion is divided. Gil Troy (2013, 12–13) has noted that the idealized version emphasizes his government’s tax-cutting and deregulation

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policies which stimulated economic growth. Against this is a more critical position which highlights the failures of economic performance during the Reagan government, especially in its early years. This included a recession in 1981–1982 which resulted in the highest rate of unemployment since the Great Depression, rising national debt and in the gap between rich and poor, and the growing economic threat of West German and Japanese competitiveness. Robert Collins (2006) observes that Reagan’s supply-side economic policies did make an impact although to a limited extent; other factors contributed to economic growth later in the decade, including the advances and spread of information technology, increased globalization, and corporate restructuring. These issues had little to do with Reagan or the team around him. And there was a wide range of social ills which failed to be addressed during his time in office: homelessness, the growing drug problem and the violence it spawned, and the AIDS epidemic. Similarly, Reagan’s impact on foreign policy has also been debated. The late 1970s and early 1980s was a time when the Cold War had gotten colder. Suspecting a growing Soviet threat, the Reagan government heated up the arms race by increasing defence spending, despite subsequent records suggesting that the Soviets were never near the level assumed by Washington. Yet Reagan supporters claim that the arms race contributed to the Soviet collapse and end of the Cold War by pressing Moscow to realize it could not win and choosing a more conciliatory leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, a figure who Reagan was able to win over through his personal diplomacy. Reagan’s character is touted as a key factor when assessing his presidency. Certainly he was a great rhetorician. He offered a clear and coherent ideology which was in favor of freedom and individualism. This was captured in his 1984 re-election commercial, “Morning in America.” It was a vision of optimism and renewal, complemented by his own particular style, a positive and folksy demeanor combined with a pragmatism in achieving his goals. Indeed, this was very well received by the American public, especially when his polls recovered during the 1980s. But support was stronger for Reagan the man than for many of his policies (Troy 2013, 13). Reagan sensed and reinforced a change in the national mood, even if his responsibility for his economic and foreign policies was questioned. This became apparent when his vice president, George H. W. Bush, succeeded him. While responding pragmatically to the end of the Cold War and the uncertainties it threw up (including his coalition building during the 1990–1991 Gulf crisis and the fallout from the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe), he was punished for domestic reasons. While continuing the laissez-faire approach to the economy, the United States had slipped into recession, costing him the 1992 election. The 1992 victor, Bill Clinton, although supremely talented like Reagan before him, generated divisiveness. Clinton was a resisting president, swim-

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ming against the tide of the Reagan Revolution. His victory in the election, as a Democrat, owed much to the role of an independent populist, Ross Perot, who drew votes away from the Republicans. Clinton recognized that the tide in public opinion was against “big government” and his most memorable achievement, the ending of “welfare as we know it,” was very much in keeping with that sentiment. Michael Takiff (2010, 19) summarizes Clinton’s legacy as constrained by his times. He served during the 1990s, just after the Cold War ended and just before the so-called Global War on Terror began in the early 2000s. His was a time when there was little demand for greatness and the public was wary of grand schemes, most notably his failure to achieve health care reform—an area close to his heart. Recent scholarship has seen Clinton as an especially effective president (see White 2012), all the more so because he often had to work against a strong current in voter opinion. He had the good fortune to be president during the dot.com boom in the American economy, which generated 22 million new jobs. But there is nothing that can be pointed to as Clinton’s great contribution to American public life (Takiff 2010). Following the 1994 midterm elections, he faced a confrontational Republican majority in Congress which sought to block his policies. The prospect of further domestic reform was effectively ended when the Lewinsky scandal emerged and the president and Congress went on a collision course towards impeachment. The attention given to Clinton’s private life reflected the wider change in the character of public life more generally. Whereas the personal character of presidents had not been considered important to earlier generations, by the end of the twentieth century this had changed. To illustrate this, it is notable how much had changed by Clinton’s presidency when compared to the time of John F. Kennedy; in the 1960s media attention about the president’s private life was noticeably less and it certainly did not impact on his role as president (White 2012, 3). Following the most contentious and controversial election in recent US history, George W. Bush won the 2000 election, albeit with a minority of the popular vote and depending on a partisan Supreme Court decision suppressing a recount of the vote in the state of Florida. During the campaign he had projected himself as a “compassionate conservative,” alluding to the social ills which had gone unaddressed during the 1980s and which had been picked up on by Clinton during the 1990s. Yet whatever image this portended was effectively undone by the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. With the collapse of the two buildings in New York, total dead came to over 3,000. The attack was a national and global shock. Although a militant Islamist threat had been identified within the governing system during the 1990s, its significance had been downgraded in early 2001, partly due to the antipathy that the new Republican government and its members felt for the global

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activism of the outgoing Democratic administration. September 11 changed all that. In the immediate aftermath Bush now presented himself as a “war president,” and with massive support in Congress and the country at large, he directed the United States towards military action, first in Afghanistan to seek out and destroy the leadership of the Al Qaeda network responsible for the attacks. Then, during 2002 and claiming “unfinished business” from the 1991 war, he began preparations for an invasion of Iraq, ostensibly to rid it of weapons of mass destruction. The war began in March 2003 with only Britain and a handful of other states in support. Following the defeat of its president, Saddam Hussein, military operations were brought to an end a month later. The Iraq war had a huge global cost for Bush. Despite international sympathy following September 11, and support for the Afghan invasion, he managed to squander it all during 2002–2003 by his unwillingness to work with international institutions and other powers to contain Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Enthusiasm for his policies among the American public declined sharply as the war dragged on with an apparent failure to rebuild the society and economy in either country. By the end of Bush’s presidency in January 2009, US troops were still stationed in both countries. Domestically, Bush oversaw a coarsening in political life. Politics became increasingly partisan and polarized, especially over social issues as there was general consensus over economic policy. Society was broadly moving in a more liberal direction on many social issues. The gay marriage issue is an exceptionally strong example. As the courts began to rule in favor of gay marriage in some states, conservative activists moved to pass anti-gay marriage legislation in many states. Constitutional amendments to that purpose passed in many states. Even Bill Clinton supported the “defense of marriage act” which allowed more conservative states to not recognize gay marriages in more progressive states. But opinion was clearly moving in the opposite direction, especially among younger voters, and both legislative and judicial actions were in support of marriage equality. By the mid-2010s the conservatives had given up the struggle to prevent legalization of gay marriage and were reduced to trying to defend conscientious objection on the part of bakers who might not want to bake cakes for a gay wedding. Attitudes were also moving in the progressive direction on issues including interracial marriage, which had long been legal but was increasingly socially acceptable, and ending marijuana prohibition. The only major issue that did not budge was abortion, where opinion continued to be divided, with strong convictions on both sides and ambivalence on the part of the large part of the population. Economically, Bush cut taxes while massively increasing public spending, much of it during the 2000s as a result of the foreign wars. Then in 2008 the consequences of rising house prices, financial deregulation, subprime

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lending and their packaging into highly complex financial products occurred. Several financial institutions collapsed or were on the verge of doing so; the wider banking system was under threat. The government was forced to step in to save the system, pledging over $700 billion to do so. The Millennial Regime, 2008–Present In 2008 the presidential election was won by Barack Obama, America’s first black president. Obama was a charismatic speaker with a vaguely progressive ideology with a lot of utopian vagueness—“a future you can believe in.” As this book is being written (in 2016), it is too soon for historians to have judged whether Obama’s election was the beginning of a new political regime, or just a temporary deviation from the trends of the Reagan era, as Bill Clinton’s was. The longer historical outcome will determine whether Obama is judged a resisting or a transformational president. Obama was only able to pass his most important accomplishment, the health care reform that was labelled Obamacare, without any support from Republican legislators. Political life was even more polarized during his presidency than during the Bush administration, despite general support for his winding down American involvement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama won re-election to the presidency in 2012, but the Republicans gained strongly in the midterm congressional elections in both 2010 and 2014, when a smaller and older segment of the population voted. If, however, the Democrats succeed in winning the White House in the 2016 election, and make gains in the congressional elections, it will seem obvious that Obama’s 2008 election was the beginning of a new cycle in American politics, one that reflects the social liberalism of the emerging millennial generation. Mainstream Republican leaders generally recognize that the climate of opinion in the country is changing, as is the nature of the electorate with the growth of the Hispanic and other immigrant groups. But our theory is not primarily about who wins an election. Elections are like the weather, chaotic and unpredictable. We are more interested in underlying trends in the climate of the times. In this regard Obama does represent a break with the past. As the journalist James Mann (cited in Mintz and Wayne 2016, 108–9) has noted: Obama’s views of the world and of America’s role in it were shaped to a far greater extent by his age and by the times in which he came to national prominence. . . . Obama was the first president since Vietnam whose personal life and career was utterly unaffected by that war. . . . [He and his associates] self-consciously thought of themselves as a new generation. . . . They were post-baby-boomers, born in the 1960s and 1970s; they were infants or in elementary school (or, in one case, not yet born) during the Vietnam War . . . and had not yet started their careers in government at the end of the Cold War.

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Given this shift within the political elite, our judgment is that if either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders win the 2016 election for the Democrats, she or he will be an articulative president, continuing to build the regime that started with Obama’s election. But if Donald Trump wins the election for the Republicans he will be a preemptive president, resisting the changes in the political climate. Our view coincides with that of journalist Peter Beinart in the January 2016 edition of The Atlantic: Barack Obama sought the presidency hoping to be the Democrats’ Reagan: a president who changed America’s ideological trajectory. And he has changed it. He has pushed the political agenda as dramatically to the left as Reagan pushed it to the right, and, as under Reagan, the public has acquiesced more than it has rebelled. Reagan’s final victory came when Democrats adapted to the new political world he had made, and there is reason to believe that the next Republican president will find it necessary to make similar concessions to political reality.

The political shifts beginning with the Obama presidency fit the cyclical model of American politics advanced by the Arthur Schlesingers, Sr. and Jr. (1949, 1986) and Frank Klingberg (1952). These historians observed that American politics cycles between liberal and conservative poles in domestic policy and between introverted versus extroverted poles in foreign policy. While the terms have changed, Obamacare is clearly a liberal initiative similar to the Social Security and Medicare programs begun during periods of liberal dominance in the past. And, from both Republicans and Democrats, there is increasing criticism of neoliberal globalization and pressure for more attention to domestic needs. The continuation of this historical pattern is another reason for suspecting that the election of Obama began a new regime in American politics that is likely to persist for two or three decades. BRAZIL Re-establishing Democracy, 1985–1993 In Brazil, the introduction of neoliberal economics came after the transition back to multi-party democracy because both the Second Republic and the Military Regime had continued the statist economic model from the Vargas Regime. By the late 1970s the public was fed up with the Military Regime’s inability to sustain economic growth or stabilize the currency, but the discontent was focused on the political system instead of on economic policy. The main demand was for direct election of the president, rather than the indirect electoral college model introduced by the Military Regime. This constitutional change was not achieved, but the desire for civilian democracy was so

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strong that the opposition candidate, Tancredo Neves, won the election even under the system that favored the conservative rural states. Neves was a senior statesman who had learned his trade from Vargas and Kubitschek and was well liked by the population. But, tragically, he died of natural causes just before taking office, denying Brazilians the popular leader they had chosen. The presidency was then given to his vice presidential candidate, José Sarney, who had until recently been a member of the promilitary party and who had been selected to balance the ticket and reassure the military. Sarney was also a skilled, traditional politician, but from a much more conservative, anti-Vargas track. As president, he was forced to accept that he did not have the legitimacy for strong presidential leadership. This meant that crucial national leadership went to the Congress, an unprecedented situation for Brazil. The main task was writing a new constitution for the emerging civilian democracy, and this was given to a constitutional convention, composed of members of the Congress. The resulting 1988 constitution, although utopian in some ways and requiring significant amendment later on, did provide a framework for the new Brazilian republic. It included direct election of the president by majority vote. Among the members of the convention were two prominent leaders who later became president of Brazil: Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. While Congress focused on constitutional matters, José Sarney was left with the economic mess inherited from the Military Regime. The government couldn’t pay for its programs or service its debts, and it kept avoiding a real solution by paying its bills with inflated currency. Like most Brazilian presidents before him, Sarney had little understanding of economics. He was better known as the author of spicy novels about life in the backlands of the northeast. He basically viewed inflation as a moral issue caused by greedy businessmen and consumers. Of course, his finance ministers and their staff knew what needed to be done, but they didn’t have the political clout to impose budgetary reform, so their plans always failed. Sarney resorted to asking citizens to become “Auditors for Sarney” and report merchants who were raising prices so they could be shamed. But the campaign was bound to fail because the real problem was that the government was printing too much money. Its failure was the great disappointment of Sarney’s life. In 1989 the first direct elections for president were held under the new constitution. A young, charismatic former governor of the peripheral state of Alagoas in the northeast, Fernando Collor, was elected, beating the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, or PT) candidate, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Collor’s election was aided by broad support from the political establishment, big business, the industrialists and the mass media, who feared that a victory for Lula and the PT would mean a radical transition to socialism.

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This concern was understandable, because the PT party platform had a lot of radical rhetoric. Collor had a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Alagoas, which was more economics training than most Brazilian presidents who had been lawyers or generals. His career, before going into politics, was in journalism and he was the first Brazilian presidential candidate to use professional marketers to develop a modern television campaign. His strongest ability was handling the mass media, something that had not previously been a strong point of Brazilian politicians. A representative of the “New Right,” Collor became famous for his attacks on the “maharajas” (corrupt politicians) of the previous administrations. He sought to build a new Brazil by privatizing government enterprises and imposing an anti-inflation plan. Beginning the privatization process was his most lasting contribution, but his anti-inflation plan was much more dramatic. Almost immediately after his inauguration, he announced that the government had frozen all personal bank accounts in the country, allowing people to withdraw only a small amount of money each month. After this shock treatment, prices were to be controlled and the economy gradually stabilized. Collor’s plan was hard on precisely the people who had voted for him, middle-class people who had money in inflation-adjusted bank accounts. The poor didn’t have bank accounts and lived from paycheck to paycheck. The rich had other ways to protect their wealth. But the middle classes were so desperate for a solution to the hyperinflation problem that they accepted his plan with remarkably little grumbling. And his plan might have worked if he had followed it up with rigorous measures to cut government spending. But Collor couldn’t make these fundamental changes because he lacked a strong governing coalition in Congress (Menguello 1998)—a fact not lost on subsequent presidents. He was basically a maverick whose popularity was based on ridiculing other politicians. This did not make it easy for him to get their cooperation on budgetary matters. Collor’s economic failures and his inability to find and keep allies made him vulnerable when his brother accused him of self-enrichment and corruption in May 1992. There was a mass movement against him and the Chamber of Deputies went ahead and impeached him. As in the United States, an impeachment is only an indictment; removal from office requires a conviction by the Senate. Anticipating a conviction by the Senate, Collor resigned in December 1992. Never having been convicted, however, he was able to return to political life after a few years, getting elected senator from Alagoas and becoming a close collaborator later on with President Lula da Silva. Collor had aspired to be a transformational president; he had simply failed.

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The Real Regime, 1993–2014 The vice president, Itamar Franco, was a political independent like Collor who also lacked a strong party base in Congress. In contrast to Collor’s New Right credentials, Franco was a traditional politician with a statist ideology similar to that of Getúlio Vargas. To overcome his weak position, he reached out to the parties that had impeached Collor, making use of patronage to gain their support. Lacking any alternative to Collor’s privatization and liberalization program, and having no understanding of political economy, he continued Collor’s programs, although he made efforts to get the Congress more involved in the policymaking process. As a result, government became more inefficient and ineffective. He was essentially a transactional president, just trying to keep the system running. This was an important contribution after the chaos of the Collor presidency. But it did not solve the inflation crisis. After three of his finance ministers had failed to control inflation, President Itamar Franco made what turned out to be a regime-changing decision. He appointed Senator Fernando Henrique Cardoso as finance minister. Cardoso had had a prominent academic career as a sociologist before going into politics as part of the redemocratization movement (Goertzel 1999, Cardoso and Winter 2007). He had been part of a Marxist study group as a young professor in São Paulo and he is often portrayed as a Marxist who changed his views, becoming a neoliberal. This is not actually true; his most famous book had actually argued that Third World countries could find strategies for development within the capitalist world system. Cardoso was not an economist, and he had never studied the econometrics of inflation. He was foreign minister when President Franco called him in New York in May 1993 to urge him to take the finance minister post. He was fluent in English and French and enjoyed being foreign minister, and he was reluctant to take the financial post. The finance minister position was thought of as a kiss of death for a politician because they always failed and left in disgrace. But Itamar Franco insisted and went ahead and announced the appointment. To everyone’s surprise, Cardoso solved the inflation problem with the Real Plan, and he did it without imposing austerity or confiscating anyone’s money. Poor people actually benefited the most from his plan because they had the fewest protections against inflation. Why was Cardoso able to do this when others had failed? Not because he had a new theory of inflation or thought of something no one had thought of before. He recruited some of the country’s top economists to detail a plan, many of whom had worked on previous plans and knew the pitfalls. But plans are easy, the hard part is getting them implemented, which is fundamentally a political task.

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There were two fundamental reasons for Cardoso’s success, in addition to his deep understanding of Brazilian society and governance. First, he was lucky to become finance minister at a time when success was possible. The business and political elites were worried that hyperinflation would cause the financial system to collapse altogether and were ready to do something even if it hurt. Second, he was very well respected by the political establishment, and especially with Congress. People trusted him and were willing to cooperate with him. President Itamar Franco gave him full support, even though he really didn’t understand what Cardoso was doing. The easy part was introducing a new currency, the real. Brazil had done that before. The hard part was not printing too much money, which meant cutting government expenditures, especially money the federal government gave to the states to balance their budgets. Cardoso’s plan worked because Congress gave him effective control of most of the federal budget, calling it a special emergency measure. The result was that Cardoso became an instant hero, despite being an intellectual who used big words and spoke foreign languages and had no charisma whatsoever. Cardoso is an excellent retail politician, working face to face with leaders and constituents, but he is not an exciting speaker on television or in mass gatherings. Nevertheless, his success in ending inflation was enough to get him elected president in 1994, against Lula da Silva of the Workers Party. The Workers Party activists were outraged; they thought Cardoso’s plan was just one more gimmick that was sure to fail, as Sarney’s and Collor’s had, and that they had been cheated out of the presidency. But the plan didn’t fail and Cardoso was re-elected in 1998 despite the fact that the country had gone into an economic downturn due to crises in Mexico, Russia and other places. He got the Congress to amend the constitution so he could be re-elected. Despite being an intellectual, Cardoso fundamentally played a pragmatic role as finance minister and then as president. He found a practical solution for inflation, which included setting up a more responsible budgetary system that compelled the federal and state governments to control their spending. He began an administrative reform to make government more efficient. And he worked to professionalize the federal police system to actually do something about corruption. Many of the reforms he proposed were resisted by Congress because they threatened traditional prerogatives. Standing against Cardoso in both presidential elections had been the Workers Party (PT) candidate, Lula da Silva. The PT was distinctive in Brazilian politics, and perhaps in the world. Founded in 1980, it represented the autonomous trade unions, new social movements, the working class and many middle-class individuals inspired by socialist ideals. The Catholic left was especially influential in it, as well as the movement for land reform. During the 1980s and 1990s it sought to challenge the prevailing political

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and party system by being a key opposition force. However, to win the presidency it had to broaden its support from its core constituencies to include the broad middle class. As Przeworski (1985) has argued, the compromises required to do this usually undermine the ideological “purity” of socialist parties. The PT was no different in this regard. In 1994 the PT had been on the wrong side of history by opposing Cardoso’s economic reforms, assuming that they would not succeed and would not be good for the working class. Following his 1998 defeat, Lula decided he wanted to win even at the expense of compromising ideological purity. He turned his campaign over to a professional marketing consultant. The Workers Party has internal democracy, and some of the internal groups were opposed to these changes. But the party was attracting more middle-class people, especially government employees, and many of them supported the change in strategy (Samuels 2006). These activists were convinced that the PT had to appeal to the middle class; just being the party of the workers and the intellectual left was not enough. Two key decisions shaped the 2002 election campaign. One was to issue Lula’s manifesto, “A Letter to the Brazilian People,” where he confirmed that the Workers Party would pay the country’s debts to international lenders, which meant continuing the budgetary procedures instituted by Cardoso. The other was to broaden his electoral coalition to include the pro-market Liberal Party with its ties to evangelical Christians and entrepreneurs (Leal 2004). Lula’s chief opponent in the 2002 election, José Serra, was a respected leader with unquestioned democratic credentials, but he lacked the charisma that came naturally to Lula da Silva. Lula won the election with 61.3 percent of the vote against Serra’s 38.7 percent. Lula was the first Brazilian president to come from the working class and the labor movement. He had been born into abject poverty in the northeast and migrated to São Paulo as a child where he had worked as a shoeshine boy before going to trade school and working as a lathe mechanic and rising to become leader of a trade union and then the Workers Party. After the election he continued to be very popular, except with some of the left-wing elements of his own party who were disgusted with his compromises with neoliberalism. Some of them formed splinter parties. But most Workers Party activists remained loyal and many found good jobs in the government. In terms of fiscal policy, Lula was more of a neoliberal than Cardoso had been, at least in his first presidential term. He produced a larger primary budget surplus, the surplus before making debt payments. Ironically, Lula’s most important economic contribution was reassuring domestic and international investors that radical change was not coming to Brazil. The Workers Party was no longer a threat to capitalism. Lula pioneered a style that was copied by politicians throughout Latin America and which some call “neo-

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populism”: combining populist rhetoric with neoliberal economics. Although Lula’s rhetoric was transformational, the theme of his inauguration speech was “change,” in practice he was a consolidating president, building on and articulating the regime that Cardoso had created. This was frustrating to the left, but they couldn’t complain effectively because Lula was tremendously popular and the Brazilian economy boomed, largely because of high global commodity prices. The Workers Party was able to find government jobs for many of its activists, increasing the government payroll. Lula began a popular campaign to end hunger, which didn’t really work because the problem wasn’t a shortage of food but a shortage of money to buy it. So he expanded an income redistribution program that Cardoso had begun and gave cash payments to millions of very poor people. When the global recession of 2008 hit, Brazil was proud to do better than the United States or Western Europe. People always said that “when the United States caught a cold, Brazil got pneumonia.” Now Brazil’s fortunes were reversed. The United States and Europe were in crisis, and Brazil was taking off (Montero 2014). The mood was captured best by The Economist (November 12, 2009), which published a cover picture of the Christ the Redeemer statue taking off like a rocket. Judicial Offensive and Regime Paralysis, 2014–Present And then it all came crashing down. This shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was; one of the rules of thumb in economics is “the bigger the boom, the bigger the bust.” But this was bigger than anyone predicted because a number of things happened at about the same time. First, Lula’s second term expired at the end of 2010 and he couldn’t run for re-election. He chose his chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, as the candidate of the Workers Party and she won the 2010 election. She was an administrator who had never held political office, lacked charisma, and was elected entirely as a placeholder for Lula. Second, the global commodities boom ended, cutting the flow of revenue that had sustained the boom. The Rousseff government, however, was overconfident based on the country’s remarkable success during the global downturn that began in 2008. They had succeeded then because they had a large state sector that provided a powerful economic stimulus. This was good economic policy during a downturn, but Rousseff and the Workers Party denied the necessity to cut back and actually kept increasing spending and expanding the size of government (Leitão 2015). They relied on creative bookkeeping to disguise the inflationary effects. Third, the biggest corruption scandal in Brazilian history broke out, thanks to the highly professional efforts of the federal police and the judiciary. This scandal was rooted in the national oil company, Petrobras, which

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had been the country’s pride and joy since the Vargas regime. Millions of dollars were siphoned off by employees who had secret accounts in Switzerland or other financial havens, and a good bit was channeled into the Workers Party for the 2014 elections. A similar scandal had broken out during Lula’s government, and his chief of staff, José Dirceu, had actually gone to prison. But Dirceu did not implicate Lula and Lula persuaded his supporters that the buck stopped with Dirceu. But the economy was booming and Lula was charismatic; Dilma had neither advantage. Dilma Rousseff’s first term ended in 2014 at which time Lula da Silva could have run under the constitution, but he and the Workers Party decided it was best to nominate Dilma for re-election. Not doing so would have been a negative statement about her presidency. Also, Lula has suffered from throat cancer and might not have been at his best. Her strongest challengers were Aécio Neves, grandson of Tancredo and the candidate of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s party, and Marina Silva, an environmentalist from the Amazon region who was a vice presidential candidate until the candidate she was running with, Eduardo Campos, died in a plane accident. Marina’s campaign started out strong, but faltered when she didn’t articulate her plans clearly. Aécio then came on strong, but not quite strong enough to overcome a very effective Workers Party campaign. The essence of the Workers Party campaign was to deny that Brazil was having a major crisis and would have to make some hard decisions. Dilma Rousseff backed this message up with an upsurge in spending, which the country really couldn’t afford. Aécio and Marina were more realistic in their analyses. Dilma Rousseff won re-election narrowly, depending heavily on votes from workingclass and poor Brazilians who feared losing benefits if the Workers Party was voted out. As soon as the election was over, the Rousseff government acknowledged that the opposition had been right and instituted cutbacks that the opposition had said would be needed. People felt deceived and her popularity plummeted, setting a new low record. Lula had set a record for high popularity. There were mass demonstrations calling for her impeachment, justified by budgetary and campaign financing irregularities, and there was the possibility that the Supreme Electoral Tribunal would void the results of the 2014 election. Dilma tried calling Lula da Silva back into the government, appointing him to the post she had held, chief of staff. One advantage of this job was it meant Lula could not be prosecuted for financial irregularities—it was alleged that he had used kickback money to buy a beach house. But the courts voided that appointment, saying that it was made for purposes of avoiding prosecution. As this is being written, both the lower and upper legislative houses have voted for Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and a trial in the Senate is imminent. One thing that is remarkable, however, is the professionalism and inde-

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pendence of both the judiciary and the federal police, who are acting against the government in power. If Brazil had a parliamentary system, the solution would be obvious—parliament would vote no confidence in the government and a new election would be held. With a presidential system, however, impeachment is intended to be used only for serious malfeasance in office. And, even if it is used, the presidency goes to the vice president, in this case Michel Temer of the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, a man who is also under investigation by the judiciary. Several hundred congressmen are also being investigated. The judicial offensive had clearly changed the nature of the political regime. Corruption had previously been uncovered mostly by the press and criminal punishment was delayed for many years if it happened at all. The corruption scandals have not been limited to the Workers Party and its allies, although the accusations against others have been less severe. The youthful protestors are disgusted with Brazilian politics in general; they are sometimes as likely to boo politicians from opposition parties as they are government officials. As this is being written, in June of 2016, the country is very much in need of a party or candidate who can articulate a positive vision of the future. If a means cannot be found to call a new election, and Dilma is impeached, it is hoped that Michel Temer will be able to put together a transitional government to hold the country together until the 2018 elections. MEXICO Transition to Democracy, 1988–2000 Mexico was the opposite of Brazil in that the neoliberal economic reforms came first, followed by political reform. The one-party regime was becoming less popular, but the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) managed to hold onto power long enough to make the key economic changes. Grievances accumulated as they do in any long-lasting regime. The slaughter of the students in 1968 was never forgiven. There were economic strains and some remarkably embarrassing corruption scandals. The 1982 default undermined the PRI image as a competent manager. The chaos of the revolution was a long time in the past, and many Mexicans thought they deserved a real say in choosing their presidents as people in other countries did. Activists began to defect from the PRI and join the opposition parties that had never been permitted more than token successes at the federal level. Indeed, during the 1980s and 1990s opposition parties including the Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party, or PAN) had begun to win elections at the local and state levels and built support among conservatives and the business elite. Meanwhile, in the PRI a prominent dissident, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, joined with others of the more progressive tendency within the party to create

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a “Democratic Current” and call for an open process to select presidential candidates. This was rejected by the party establishment, which opted for the technocratic Carlos Salinas. So in 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas left the PRI and ran for president supported by a coalition of leftist parties and other individuals and groups disillusioned with the PRI. This formation eventually became known as the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Despite his first name, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas is of European descent and looks and sounds very much like a middle-aged white bureaucrat. He is the son of Lazaro Cárdenas, the general who started the one-party system. With his famous name and managerial skills, he had risen through the PRI bureaucracy to be governor of the state of Michoacán and then chief of government of the Federal District, in effect the mayor of Mexico City. He did amazingly well in the 1988 election and on election night the government was forced to announce that the computer system counting the votes had “crashed.” When it came back up, they announced that the PRI had “won” again, with Carlos Salinas gaining 50 percent against Cardenas’ 30 percent. This apparent abuse of power undermined the PRI’s legitimacy. Carlos Salinas, the son of an economist and government official, was a student at the National Autonomous University in 1968, but there is no evidence that he participated in any of the demonstrations. He came from an elite family and was a skilled dressage horseman who represented Mexico in the Pan American games in 1971. He also earned a PhD degree in public administration from Harvard University, continuing the pattern of leadership by men with Ivy League social science doctorates. Carlos Salinas took power under the worst of conditions because of the defective vote count in 1988 and the crisis in the economy. But it was an excellent opportunity to use his training in public administration to take the lemons and make lemonade. He publicly acknowledged the need for change and promised, in his inaugural address, to hasten the modernization of the country, politically, economically and socially. Constitutional changes cut out most of the restrictions on the Catholic Church. A vigorous anti-corruption campaign was instituted, including the detention of the head of the oil workers union. And, perhaps most significantly, he and his successor, Ernesto Zedillo, oversaw a change from the statism of traditional party bosses to a more neoliberal economic model which benefited an emerging entrepreneurial elite (O’Toole 2010, 4). Central to this change was the PRI’s endorsement of Mexico’s entry into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which increased trade with the United States and opened up economic and employment opportunities while at the same time presenting considerable challenges and social problems including higher costs for small farmers. In addition to changing economic policies, Salinas professed to want to end the conventional mode of politics. This reflected the fact that during the 1990s opposition parties received greater electoral support and won signifi-

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cant state level offices, including the governorship of the state of Baja California. Salinas claimed that he wanted to reform the PRI, which included accepting opposition election victories and rejecting fraudulent ones. He was eager for Mexico to uphold international norms in favor of democracy (Adams 2010, 266). Outside observers were brought in to monitor the 1994 election. Camp (2010, 12) notes that in contrast to previous forms of technocratic involvement in government, Salinas was distinctive in breaking with the technocratic tradition of the PRI and moving toward real electoral democracy. In 1994 the PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, who had a master’s degree in development economics from the University of Pennsylvania, was assassinated and replaced with another technocrat, Ernesto Zedillo, with a PhD in economics from Yale. Despite Zedillo’s election in a clean race, the country was soon engulfed in an economic crisis owing to rising debt. At the same time as Zedillo’s presidency began, the Zapatista uprising of indigenous people, led by the mysterious masked Subcomandante Marcos, exploded in the southern state of Chiapas on the border with Guatemala. Maintaining the neoliberal economic course set by Salinas, Zedillo provided a modest redistributive program as a compensation for an increasing impoverishment in society and the fragmentation of the corporatist model. Wider changes meant that fraud and corruption in the public sector began to be tackled. But perhaps most significantly, Zedillo broke with the past by refusing to announce a successor in 2000—although this mattered little for the subsequent PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida. In rejecting the dedazo associated with previous PRI presidents, Zedillo was perceived to have diminished the leadership of the president (Bartra 2013, 4). And in 1997 presidential dominance was diminished further by the PRI’s loss of a majority in congressional elections, forcing Zedillo to build coalitions to pass his legislation. Multi-party Democracy, 2000–Present The establishment of a multi-party system was crystallized when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party won the presidential election in 2000 and was allowed to take power. Vicente Fox continued the pattern of governance by Ivy League graduates, but his Harvard degree was in management, not in economics. He had a very successful career with Coca-Cola, becoming chief of operations for Mexico and then for Latin America as a whole. He then went into politics with the conservative National Action Party (PAN) and was elected governor of the state of Guanajuato. Although Fox and the National Action Party represented the managerial class and the ideological right, the vote for Fox did not mean an endorsement of these groups or their philosophies as much as a strong desire for change

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from the one-party system. There was essential agreement between the leadership of the PAN and the PRI on the need for neoliberal changes. This was expressed by support for Fox’s National Development Plan and opening many parts of Mexico’s nationalized sectors, including the petroleum, natural gas and electricity companies, to competitive forces. This also included support for an increase in domestic and foreign investment alongside greater fiscal stability (Adams 2010, 276). In other areas Fox was unable to make much headway. The PAN did not have a governing majority in Congress and the other two parties were able to block a great deal of his proposed legislation. Despite losing the presidency, the PRI remained a very powerful force in Congress and in state governments. Fox had to face the fact that the PRI continued to hold corporatist relationships with many organized sectors, especially teachers and labor. As a result, Fox was constrained as president; his greatest significance was the fact of his election which broke the PRI’s electoral dominance. As the 2000s progressed, tensions appeared in both the Mexican left and right between “populists” who appealed to social movements outside of the formal electoral system and “democrats” who stressed the importance of political parties for representation of established business groups (Bartra 2013, ix–xi). This was evident in the 2006 election between the PAN candidate, Felipe Calderón, and the candidate of the left-leaning Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD), Andrés Manuel López Obrador (with the PRI candidate a weak third). Calderón had a master’s in public administration from Harvard; López Obrador’s degree was in political and administrative sciences from the National University of Mexico. López Obrador represented the more populist elements within the umbrella-like PRD, an organization which included a wide range of different political and social groups and movements. His early career was in the Indigenous People’s Institute and the National Consumers’ Institute, both government agencies. He was part of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’ dissident group in the PRI, then moved to the PRD. He became head of government in the Federal District (Mexico City) in 2000. The outcome of the 2006 election was very close, down to a fraction of one percent between Calderón and López Obrador, and López Obrador’s supporters staged massive protest demonstrations claiming he had been cheated out of a victory. But partial recount procedures were followed and eventually the results were accepted by most of the media. Importantly, this political dispute was resolved peacefully with the protestors using nonviolent tactics and the police forces refraining from the kind of coercion they had used in 1968 and many other times (Pansters 2012, 6–8). Calderón was the second president in succession not to come from the PRI and he followed the same direction in terms of economic and social policy, specifically liberalization and targeted assistance to the poor. But

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what marked the Calderón presidency was his “war” against the drug gangs. In his first year he sent 45,000 troops into the northern states, where the remit of the state was relatively thin. Shannon O’Neil (2009) notes Calderón’s involvement reflected the anxiety of the Mexican middle class, which placed security as its second most important concern. The increased visibility of the drug gangs and their associated violence was an unintended consequence of democracy and economic liberalization; ties between the PRI and illegal traders in the last century were undermined by the ending of single-party rule. Despite the government’s effort, by 2010 it was becoming apparent that the state was not able to eliminate the problem. At least 60,000 people had been killed by the time Calderón left office (with another 20,000 in his successor’s first 12 months). Along with the rising level of violence, the military’s involvement also contributed to the suppression of social and political protest (Pansters 2012, 5). At the same time, the failure to resolve the conflict was combined with an inability of the established political system to respond effectively to public demands. The 2009 congressional elections not only illustrated the slow pace of democratic transition (e.g., the persistence of traditional PRI rule at the subnational level), the three main parties seemed unable to reform the political institutions and process. This undermined the legitimacy of the system as a whole with increased public skepticism and distrust (Bartra 2013, xiii–xiv). In 2012, the candidate of the PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto, won the presidential election with López Obrador coming in second. But even before the election, key leaders of all three major parties had agreed on a set of policy changes that would be implemented regardless of which party’s candidate won the election. Soon after the election Peña Nieto negotiated a Pacto por México (Pact for Mexico) with the leaders of the other major parties that outlined a series of important policy changes (Montes 2013). In a sign of how much the PRI had departed from its corporatist, statist past, Peña Nieto also proposed to open up the petroleum industry to investment from international oil companies, a step that was supported by the probusiness PAN but not by the leftist PRD. The PRD leaders agreed to disagree on this issue but to cooperate on the others. This unprecedented multi-party agreement came about because leaders of all three parties were concerned about the weakness of the Mexican state in confronting drug cartels and profiteering by powerful monopolies. At the same time, agreement was possible because it helped entrenched influential interests and their advocates in each of the three parties, which may arguably perpetuate the difficulties faced by the state and its institutions. Against these institutional changes, Peña entered the second year of his administration facing criticism as the Mexican economy began to slump. In addition, the violence of the war against the drug gangs has continued, not only leaving thousands dead and disappeared, but also posing searching

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questions about the Mexican state’s control over parts of its national territory. That failure was captured succinctly in the kidnapping and murder of 43 college student protestors from Iguala, initially detained by corrupt local police and handed over to contacts in a crime syndicate in September 2014. By the end of the year the government had been subjected to nationwide protests and international criticism demanding action to end state collusion with drug gangs. As Peña reached the halfway mark of his presidency, there were worrying signs of an unwillingness to engage with the political system and society. In late 2014 Peña’s wife was caught up in a loan scandal, acquiring $4 million from Peña’s supporters to purchase a $7 million house for her and her husband. Meanwhile, at a more general level, John Ackerman (2016) observed that since taking office, Peña has veered towards authoritarian leadership and shown an unwillingness to condone dissent. As well as the most visible case of the student activists, opposition politicians and journalists have also experienced pressure and violence, with official investigations being conducted in a slow fashion and focusing on individuals at the lowest level of responsibility. In following this course, the Peña presidency echoes the impunity towards human rights which occurred under his predecessor, Calderón, in his war on the drug gangs. COLOMBIA Multi-Party Democracy, 1990–Present In 1986, the Liberal candidate, Virgilio Barco, won with 4.1 million votes, against 2.6 million for the Conservative candidate. A new feature was the participation of Jaime Pardo of the Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union, UP), a party organized by guerrillas who had transitioned to civilian politics. The UP won only 328,752 votes, but right-wing extremists could not accept their nonviolent integration into political life. UP candidates were targeted for assassination by members of anti-communist militia groups and over 1,000 were killed, including Jaime Pardo, who was assassinated in 1987. The assassinations were organized by some combination of anti-communist militias, drug syndicates, and death squads within the military, but few were ever prosecuted. At this point, it was clear that power sharing between Liberals and Conservatives was not working; too many groups and factions were excluded and there weren’t enough spoils to distribute to everyone. President Virgilio Barco set up an administration entirely of Liberal Party politicians, while other parties organized as opposition in the hope of winning future elections. From here on, multi-party competition was accepted as the norm in Colombian

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politics, even among many on the revolutionary left who risked their lives whenever they contested elections. The transition to neoliberalism was less of an issue because Columbia never had a comprehensive corporatist state as in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil. Its economy was more open to world markets and was more dependent on commodity exports. There was an economic reform package in 1985, but it was less austere than the reforms needed in many other countries, and less conditionality was placed on the country’s ability to access new foreign loans (Remmer 1998). So the challenge for Colombia was not so much implementing neoliberal economics as learning to live with a fragmented political system. Liberals and Conservatives were still important, but the Colombian public identified less with these two parties than it had in the past. The economy had gone into a downturn, along with the rest of Latin America, and there was widespread social discontent. Strikes, unrest and rioting became more visible, as did the actions of the guerrillas and the military which opposed them. The weakness of the Colombian state allowed the drug gangs to develop into powerful cartels, some of which began to collude with elements of the state as well as with the guerrilla movements. In 1990, the Liberal Party candidate, César Gaviria, won with only 2.8 million votes, down from 4.8 million for Virgilio Barco in 1986. The runnerup was the candidate of the National Salvation Party, a splinter from the Conservative Party, with 1.4 million votes. The official Conservative Party candidate got only 739,320 votes, hardly any more than the candidate of the M-19 Democratic Alliance with 702,043. This was a strong vote for a former guerrilla leader, showing that they were a minority that could not easily be ignored. The country clearly wanted a new political regime, ending the violence and incorporating all groups into the system. President Gaviria decided the way to do that was to convoke a constituent assembly to write a new constitution, which was instituted in 1991. According to David Bushnell (1993, location 3374), the new constitution was very well received, although “no specific provisions quite explain the euphoria with which the new constitution was greeted by broad segments of Colombian opinion.” That was largely due to the feeling that a new political era was beginning. The old Congress was dissolved and a new one elected, and government got down to work on practical tasks of governing including cutting the homicide rate and fighting the drug gangs and the remaining guerrillas. Under the 1991 constitution, Liberals and Conservatives continued to be important, but politics concerned more than power sharing, with the United States increasingly involved in providing financial and military support to Colombian governments in the “drug war.” The question of how presidents

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dealt with the gangs and guerrillas became increasingly the focus of political life. The 1994 election was a close race between the Liberal Party candidate, Ernesto Samper, and the Conservative Party candidate, Andrés Pastrana. The election went into a second round, which the Liberal Party had not expected because they thought they would get more than 50 percent on the first round. They were out of campaign funds and apparently turned to drug cartels to raise six million dollars. The US government revoked Samper’s visa under anti-corruption rules. Investors were scared away and the economy went into crisis as coffee prices went down. Samper survived as president, but was replaced by Pastrana in the 1998 election. Pastrana had a good relationship with US president Bill Clinton and, in 2000, negotiated the Plan Colombia, which infused $1.35 billion mostly to support military efforts against guerrillas and drug traffickers. Pastrana made an effort to negotiate a peace with the remaining major guerrilla groups, including the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC), which seemed to be evolving into more of a criminal than a political force, dependent on kidnapping and alliances with drug dealers. When Pastrana’s efforts at negotiation finally collapsed, the public was disillusioned and desperate for a solution. FARC claimed to have taken control of some 100 municipalities, and kidnappings and assassinations and homicides were skyrocketing. The relationship between politics and the drug trade arguably directed public attention in Colombia away from economic policy. It also meant that important groups like workers and the poor were overlooked by the two main political parties. This course continued into the 2000s. In 2002 a dissident Liberal, Álvaro Uribe, won the election against the party’s official candidate. His support came from across the political divide who saw him as an alternative to the established political system (Rodríguez-Garavito 2008, 134). However, whereas in most of Latin America “alternative” was more commonly associated with challenging the neoliberal orthodoxy, in Uribe’s case it was mainly about how to deal with guerrillas and the drug gangs. Socially and economically, Uribe was a conservative and a hard-line advocate against those who challenged the state. As governor of the state of Antioquia, he had created licensed private security services to fight kidnapping and drug gangs. These policies were criticized for violating human rights and forming tacit alliances with paramilitary groups. Uribe’s goal was to strengthen the Colombian police and military forces so they could defeat the guerrillas and persuade the paramilitary groups to disarm and leave security to the government. His campaign against the guerrillas had some success, and he was able to announce that there was a permanent police or military presence in every Colombian municipality. The major right-wing paramilitary groups promised to disarm, but there were consistent criticisms from human rights groups that they were continuing to operate

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thanks to close relationships with the military and even with some of Uribe’s relatives. In 2008, Colombian forces engineered a dramatic rescue of senator and former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, along with three Americans and eleven soldiers and police officers who had been held captive for six years. Uribe’s popularity soared because of these anti-guerrilla successes, and also because the economy began to improve as a result of rising global prices for commodities during the decade. This allowed him to greatly increase social spending. In 2004, he succeeded in getting the constitution amended to permit a single re-election, and he was elected to a second term in 2006 with 62 percent of the vote. The Constitutional Court rejected a proposal to modify the constitution to allow a third term, so Uribe gave his support to his defense minister, Juan Santos, who won after two rounds of voting. Santos ran on the ticket of the Social Party of National Unity, known as the “Party of the U,” which combined support from prominent Liberals and Conservatives. Despite Uribe’s endorsement though, Santos soon faced opposition from his mentor. He initiated peace talks with the guerrillas, just as former president Pastrana had attempted in 1998–2002. Even though he was re-elected in 2014, the strong showing of Uribe and his party in the concurrent congressional elections showed there was still a large section of Colombian society opposed to an agreement. Regardless of this, Santos ignored his former boss and through 2014 and 2015 his government engaged in stop-start negotiations with FARC in Havana on how to resolve the conflict—the outcome of which remains unfinished at the time of writing and which may not amount to much in the long run. Indeed Kyla Sankey (2016) has suggested that this is the first time the two parties have continued negotiations without one side leaving the table. This is because so little is at stake. Unlike previous attempts, the basic framework for the current negotiations has allowed the conflict to continue with no demilitarized zones, and most importantly, the deal does not seriously challenge Colombia’s property structures or economic growth model.

The low level of expectation surrounding the peace talks have been echoed elsewhere. For instance, Human Rights Watch has said that the peace deal under negotiations contains “loopholes” and “omissions” which may allow those most culpable escaping justice (Sen 2016). There are question marks about the extent to which there will be significant change for Colombia and its people. First, some have suggested that a peace deal will not lead to a demilitarization of Colombian society; even as peace talks go on, US military assistance and aid has continued to swell into the country and its armed forces (Lindsay-Poland and Tickner 2016). Second, elements of civil society, such as journalists and social activists, have

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noted continuing impunity for human rights even during the period of peace talks and with insufficient investigation and prosecution for such violations. In such circumstances, there is wariness whether there will be much improvement following a peace agreement (Carter 2016). Third, peace in the countryside is unlikely to result in mass economic improvement. Colombia’s economy is geared towards the extractive industries, including oil, mining and cash crops—all destined for the global market. The Santos government’s rural development program since 2011 is built around the establishment of large-scale farms to supply those markets, at the expense of small farmers and peasants (Sankey 2016). ARGENTINA Neoliberal Boom and Bust, 1983–2003 With the failure of the Malvinas/Falklands invasion in 1982, public disgust with the military was complete, and new elections were scheduled for October 1983. Everyone expected the Peronists to come back, but Peronists without Perón had not proved very inspiring. To everyone’s surprise, Raul Alfonsín of the Radical Party (UCR) won what was generally agreed to have been a fair election. Alfonsín was a lawyer, journalist and democracy activist who had a clear vision of what Argentina needed: to establish the truth of the human rights violations during the dictatorship, to punish the offenders, to end inflation and get the economy growing. All these goals proved much too difficult for him, given stiff resistance from the military, the legislature, and elements of the civilian population to each of them. Alfonsín established a truth commission to investigate the offenses of the military dictatorship, but the military and their sympathizers insisted that offenses by leftist guerrillas be included, and that military personnel should be excused if they were following orders. The left, especially the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, wanted their children—many of whom were killed or disappeared by the military—recognized as heroes, not prosecuted as terrorists. Judicial investigations inevitably lagged on, with no one really satisfied with the result. Several of the generals were finally convicted, but their sentences were much less than the human rights advocates thought they deserved. On the economic front, Alfonsín accepted the advice of the IMF, whose economists recommended cutting government expenditures and collecting more taxes so as to stabilize the currency and service the country’s excessive debt. This kind of austerity program is designed to impose supposedly shortterm pain on the promise of a long-term recovery. Argentinians were in no mood to suffer the pain and had no faith in the promised gain. Alfonsín was unable to impose the spending cuts that would have been necessary to give

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the plan a fair trial. Instead, he tried wage-and-price controls and currency reforms, which were only a short-term solution. When inflation returned and the economy went into a tailspin, Alfonsín’s popularity plummeted. In 1989 the Peronist candidate, with the support of union bosses and a vague election program, Carlos Menem, won a decisive victory by promising big salary increases to end austerity and increases in the government’s role in the economy. Once in office, however, Menem surprised everybody by continuing the neoliberal policies of the Alfonsín government (Roland and Chassin 2003, Brown 2010). He allied himself with the opponents of Peronism, big business and political conservatives in Buenos Aires (Snow and Manzetti 1993, 48–49). This caused Santiso (2005) to label him a “chameleon.” Menem was charismatic and doubters in his party were reassured by his strong political skills (Grindle 2000, 157–58). Menem had a limited interest in economics; he turned the post of economy minister over to Domingo Cavallo, an economist and politician, who came up with the novel idea of linking the value of the Argentine peso to the US dollar and enshrining it in law: one Argentine peso would always be exchangeable for one US dollar. This was designed to give investors confidence in the stability of the system and encourage them to invest more. This worked for a time. Confidence in the economy returned and foreign investment flowed into Argentina. It was the “Argentine Miracle” and Argentina was a poster child for neoliberalism. Menem was re-elected in 1995. But for the peg to the dollar to work in the long term, government spending would have to be cut to the amount the country could pay for in dollars. This would have meant laying off government employees, cutting spending on social programs, and prosecuting corrupt officials. Cavallo understood the problems very well (Cavallo 1997). But he was not president; Menem was, and Menem could not rally the congressional support true reform required. Rather than lay off employees, the provinces simply started paying employees with their own temporary currencies. By the end of Menem’s second term, the weaknesses in his reforms were obvious and exacerbated by a slowing regional economy and the aftershocks of the East Asia financial crisis. But whereas Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Brazil had devalued the real to keep Brazilian exports competitive, Menem could not do the same in Argentina because of the constitutional link between the peso and the dollar. The 1999 election was won by Fernando de la Rúa, the UCR candidate allied to the left-leaning Frepaso alliance formed largely by Peronists who were disenchanted with Menem. De la Rúa’s finance minister opted for austerity policies which seemed the only way to save the peso, but the economy did not revive. Finally, in 2001, he called back Menem’s economy minister, Domingo Cavallo, who had been given credit for the “Argentine Miracle” in the 1990s. But Cavallo had no miracles up his sleeve, and eventually

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had to freeze bank accounts because there were not enough dollars to cover withdrawals. This led to massive riots and de la Rúa had to be extricated from his office by military helicopter. The link between the peso and the dollar was abandoned. The crisis was severe and prolonged, and Argentines expressed their frustration by blocking traffic and banging pots. But there were no calls for a military coup, and little support for efforts to build a socialist alternative to capitalism. After de la Rúa resigned, the Congress filled the gap with some temporary presidents from the Peronist party. The Left Turn, 2003–2015 By this time, neoliberalism was widely discredited, and in the 2003 elections, Nestor Kirchner, a Peronist from the far south of the country, defeated Carlos Menem’s attempt to return to power (Adams 2010, 299). This was the same year that Lula da Silva took power in Brazil, and both countries were helped by a boom in global commodity prices. Kirchner used the money to reverse many neoliberal changes, including reversing the privatization of the national airline and the national oil company (Kulfas 2015). He instituted price controls and maintained an overvalued exchange rate, making it easier for Argentines to purchase imported goods and travel abroad. He opened the way for prosecutions of military officers for the “disappearances” during the dirty wars. He rejected the policy prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund (Adams 2010, 301–2) and got most of Argentina’s debtors to take a “haircut” (greatly reduced payment) on the bonds they held. He encouraged union collective bargaining, which pushed up the minimum wage and saw unemployment fall, from 20 percent in 2002 to 9 percent by 2007 (Ferrero 2014, 51). When his term ended in 2007, Kirchner was one of the most popular outgoing presidents in Argentine history, almost as popular as Lula da Silva in Brazil. He couldn’t run again, so the Peronist party nominated his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, with the expectation that Nestor would run again after her term ended. But he died in 2010, and she was re-elected in 2011. Cristina continued many of the pro-poor policies and introduced a child allowance program, a similar program to the bolsa familia in Brazil (Ferrero 2014, 53). Like Menem a decade earlier, the Kirchners sought to increase growth, consumption and employment. However, whereas Menem had sought to limit the involvement of the state in economic activity, the Kirchners saw it as a key feature of their economic policy. Moreover, they also saw a role for social actors, many of whom had become prominent in the economic crisis in 1999–2001. Space was made for them in their governments as part of their coalitions, although as the years passed the degree of mobilization and acti-

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vism—and therefore their influence in government—steadily diminished (Malamud and De Luca 2015, 16–18). Although Cristina had initially inherited a favorable economic environment, and the country weathered the 2008 global crisis fairly well, the economic situation got much worse in the last two years of her second term (Kulfas 2015). This was for much the same reason as in Brazil: the country had relied on high commodity prices to fund expensive programs and government bureaucracies. There was still a sizeable debt burden because vulture funds in the United States had bought up Argentine debt at bargain basement prices and sued in US courts to force Argentina to pay the full amount, rejecting the “haircut” deal. After a number of years, the vulture funds won their case in the US courts and Argentina had to either pay or cut itself off from international investment funding. One of the first issues Cristina faced was trying to get farmers to maintain food stocks in the country while they sought to export more to gain valuable foreign currency. In the end she was successful when she got Congress to support her agricultural policy and deflecting attention away from her (Adams 2010, 303). At the same time, it had other tax-related consequences, subsequently making it difficult for her to raise them on the farming sector. By the end of her term, Cristina was not nearly as unpopular as Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, but neither was it certain that the Peronist candidate could win the 2015 election. The popular mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, who had decided not to challenge Cristina in 2011, decided to run in 2015. There were three major candidates in the first round, but Macri won the runoff with 51.4 percent of the vote. The opinion polls had not predicted this result, and the margin was small, but the country seemed ready for a significant regime change, and that is what Macri intended to provide. Although one writer (Curia 2012) called Nestor Kirchner “The Last Peronist,” this title may actually go to his wife. Neoliberal Populism, 2015–Present Despite the close vote, the election of Mauricio Macri in late 2015 was felt as a historical turning point in Argentina. His electoral coalition was called Cambiemos, or Let’s Change. But, as is usually the case, the nature of the promised change was not clearly specified. Many of his supporters saw him as anti-communist and anti-Peronist and anticipated a return to the traditional values of “family, honesty, work, respect, and good education regardless of social class” (Garcet 2015, location 187). A writer (Iglesias Illa 2016, location 4627) who campaigned with Macri stated: “The triumph of Cambiemos, a newly minted political force, has put an end to a quarter century of Peronist hegemony, crowned by the three Kirchner presidential terms.”

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But Peronism was a very wide partisan umbrella. Both Carlos Menem and the Kirchners were Peronists in their party affiliations, but their political regimes were very different. We described Menem as part of the Neoliberal Boom and Bust regime and the Kirchners as leading the Left Turn regime. Anti-Peronism could also mean several different things. The most obvious immediate change was a shift in foreign policy. Macri clearly aligned Argentina with the United States instead of with Venezuela and its allies in Ecuador and Nicaragua. He agreed to pay off the vulture funds, at considerable cost, so Argentina could mend its fences with global financial institutions and receive foreign investment (Rathbone and Mander 2015). This could mean a return to the Neoliberal Boom and Bust regime, and Macri is certainly in the neoliberal camp. His father was a wealthy businessman and his career before going into politics was in big business. He was active in a neoliberal think tank in Buenos Aires, and he says that Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead is the book he would take with him on a desert island. He also resembles Carlos Menem in being a bit of a playboy. Menem married a Miss Universe contestant from Chile, while Macri’s glamorous third wife publicly praised his sexual prowess during the campaign. One can see parallels to Donald Trump. There is also a parallel with George W. Bush in that one of his accomplishments was managing a professional sports club. But Macri has had some very different experiences as well. He was kidnapped by rogue federal police officers in 1991 and held captive in a tiny room for twelve days (Nash 1991). He says that experience led him to decide to go into politics. And he was a successful mayor of the city of Buenos Aires, elected in 2007 and re-elected to a second term in 2011. In Macri’s case, the political strategy he built has major elements of what Casullo (2012) calls “right-wing populism.” This strategy is similar to that which has been used by Republican politicians in the United States to appeal to working-class voters on cultural, racial, nationalist and anti-immigrant grounds while holding up successful entrepreneurs as role models. In the past, the Argentine right wing often relied on military interventions to suppress left-wing populism. Now they have a populism of their own. The hard part is making this work beyond the election. One of Macri’s often repeated remarks is “the people don’t want politics, they want management” (Casullo 2012, 54). This emphasis on management fits well with a maturing culture, not only in Argentina but in Latin America as a whole, that puts less emphasis on ideological purity and more on pragmatic success. However, another perspective from the left suggests that the absence of social protests at Macri’s policies to date—dismissing state employees, increasing the costs of gas, public transport and gasoline while reducing taxes on soy, commodities and mining corporations—owes much to the rearrangement of social movements with the state that occurred during the Kirchner

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presidencies; in particular the weakening of social movements’ autonomy and greater reliance on the state and its welfare policies between 2003 and 2015 (Monteagudo 2016). Both Menem and the Kirchners were popular when the economy was booming; their problem was getting overconfident during the boom and not preparing for the downturn. Macri’s challenge will be to make neoliberal populism work by keeping his supporters happy and ensuring that the opposition remains disorganized while reviving the Argentine economy. PERU Return to Democracy, 1980–1990 When the military gave up on their efforts at socialist transformation, the bulk of the parties in Peru’s political system were relatively weak and unstable. This was reflected in high degrees of electoral volatility from the 1980s on. The instability arguably benefited Peru’s presidents, who found their position relatively strengthened in relation to the parties and legislature. Indeed, despite declining levels of public support during their administrations, both Presidents Fernando Belaúnde Terry (1980–1985) and Alan García (1985–1990) were able to implement their preferred policies through the judicious use of decrees (Mares and Palmer 2012, 57). This contributed to a party system and political culture which emphasized hierarchical forms of leadership and unwillingness to engage the opposition (Mayorga 2006, 139). In the first elections held under the new constitution in 1980, Fernando Belaúnde won in a landslide with 42 percent of the vote, compared to 28 percent for next candidate. Belaúnde, who had been president from 1963 to 1968, had a clear mandate to restore democracy, but no clear mandate on economic policy since the military regime’s failed policies had been similar to those advocated by both his Acción Popular (Popular Action) party and by Haya de la Torre’s APRA. There were really two options: either to declare that the policies had been mistaken and to revoke them, or to decide that they had not been implemented firmly enough and implement them more severely. Belaúnde chose the first, neoliberal, option and began dismantling the associated enterprises created in the agrarian reform and privatizing communal farms by dividing them into private parcels. State subsidies were cut back and the focus was put on economic productivity rather than social justice. Belaúnde’s choice was opposed by many on the left who preferred doubling down on socialism. Their opposition led to an agrarian strike and resignation of many of Belaúnde’s cabinet ministers in protest. The most threatening opposition, however, came from two revolutionary socialist groups: the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, led by dissident former

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apristas (dropouts from Haya de la Torre’s APRA party), and the Shining Path of José Carlos Mariátegui or Sendero Luminoso, led by a philosophy professor from the interior city of Arequipa, Abimael Guzmán, who adopted the name Presidente Gonzalo. The Shining Path adopted a Maoist ideology, although most of its support was from college-age students, many of whom were from families that had lost their land in the agrarian reforms under the military government. Its initial base of operations was in the Andes, based on the Maoist idea that socialism should come from organizing the peasantry to surround and conquer the cities. It used especially vicious terrorist tactics, especially against activist from democratic leftist parties. Unfortunately for Belaúnde, the economy went into crisis in the early 1980s due to bad weather and a fall in prices for Peru’s commodity exports. This provided a fertile environment for the Shining Path insurgency, and the Belaúnde government’s reliance on the army to repress it often made things worse. By 1985, the mood in the country was grim, but there was no clear consensus on alternatives. Belaúnde stuck to the commitment to democracy, and the 1985 elections were won by Alan García, the APRA candidate. Finally, after so many years and Haya de la Torre’s death, the APRA had won power. Alan García was only 36 years old and an appealing, charismatic candidate who appealed to the democratic left. He turned to the left economically but his policies—limiting debt repayment, nationalizing the banks, price controls, and multiple exchange rates—proved ineffective. Inflation soared, per capita income dropped, and public services collapsed. The Shining Path dominated several regions of the country including parts of Lima, but opposition to its violent methods was also increasing. By 1990, Peruvians were generally fed up with all of the established political parties and groups. Seawright (2012) has argued that the country’s political party system was breaking down, with the three established political parties—Izquierda Unida, Acción Popular and APRA—perceived as corrupt and failing to provide both ideological consistency and representation for the electorate. Mayorga (2006, 146) has listed the failure of governance and political elites to respond to it as contributing to party system breakdown which opened the door to Fujimori. The result was that the 1990 election was dominated by two figures from outside the political establishment. One was Mario Vargas Llosa, a distinguished literary novelist, who had supported Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. By 1990, however, he was heading a Movement for Liberty and opposing the García government from the right. He united with the Acción Popular and the Partido Popular Cristiano (Popular Christian Party) to create a Democratic Front, but these alliances only made him seem like a member of the discredited political establishment.

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The Fujimorato, 1990–2001 Vargas Llosa won the first round of the election, but without enough votes to avoid a second round. In the second round, he lost to a candidate who was clearly outside the political establishment, Alberto Fujimori, a son of Japanese immigrants. Fujimori was a college professor and administrator, with degrees in mathematics and agronomy. He ran as the candidate of a new party called Change ’90, and got the support of people who felt outside the mainstream. His campaign theme was “work, honesty and technology.” He favored foreign investment to raise productivity, and the end of food subsidies to make farming more profitable. His campaign seemed fresh and new, and it attracted an army of volunteers who went door to door to get out the vote. In the runoff he stunned the establishment with 62.4 percent of the vote to Vargas Llosa’s 37.6 percent. Fujimori came into office without the support of a political party, except the ad-hoc one that he had created, and with no strong commitments to any interest groups. In this respect his rise highlighted the extremely unstable political party system in Peru. Fujimori faced two crises that the previous governments had been unable to solve: hyperinflation and the Shining Path insurgency. He moved quickly to solve the hyperinflation problem by adopting a neoliberal shock program similar to the one that had been proposed by Vargas Llosa and was advocated by the IMF. He had good luck when the national counterterrorism police apprehended Abimael Guzmán and most of Shining Path’s top leadership. These developments enabled Fujimori to build a wide base of support. It included elite supporters in the military hierarchy, business and international organizations, but also a wide sector of the public that supported his decisive action against Shining Path (Mayorga 2006, 148). Yet within the political system, Fujimori faced challenges: Congress remained in the control of politicians from APRA and Vargas Llosa’s FREDEMO alliance, who were critical of his neoliberal economics and other reforms. Exploiting both his popular support and his decree powers, he shut down Congress and the judiciary in what was called an autogolpe or selfcoup. This was generally accepted by the public, who were disgusted with the traditional politicians and happy to give Fujimori free reign (Mares and Palmer 2012, 57–58). He called a constitutional convention to pass a new constitution in 1993 which would allow him to stand for immediate reelection rather than having to sit out a term. In addition, a new Congress would be elected at the same time from a single nationwide district. Fujimori’s autogolpe was a deliberate effort to create a new political regime, one where the president would have effective power to handle the country’s problems. Fujimori won a congressional majority in the 1993 and 1995 elections as well as his own re-election to the presidency in 1995 with

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almost two-thirds of the vote, against 22 percent for his closest opponent. He also won election to a third term, in 2000. There was considerable resistance to his running for a third term, which was only possible because he got Congress to “reinterpret” the term limit provision as not applying to him. Nevertheless, he won the runoff with 51 percent of the vote, against 31 percent spoiled ballot protest votes and 18 percent for his opponent, Alejandro Toledo. But to everyone’s surprise, within a few months Fujimori’s support had collapsed and he had gone into voluntary exile in Japan. The trigger for this was a corruption scandal; his intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, was video recorded bribing a congressman. Analysts are not certain why Fujimori’s support collapsed so quickly (Carrión 2006), but several reasons can be suggested. Fujimori had no significant party organization behind him. Vladimiro Montesinos went into hiding in Venezuela, and was believed to have information about other corruption directly linked to Fujimori, while Fujimori had compromised his legitimacy by running for a third term that was constitutionally questionable. Serial Neoliberal Populism, 2001–Present Since Fujimori’s downfall, Peru has had regular elections and the results have been generally accepted as valid. The three presidents since Fujimori have emphasized strong presidential leadership and symbolic appeals to mass culture along with more or less neoliberal economics. The elections have revolved more around the personalities of the individual candidates than party identification. But there was considerable agreement on sticking with neoliberal economics and electoral democracy. Alejandro Toledo had first run against Fujimori in 1995, winning only 3 percent of the vote. But he got name familiarity and his personal story was appealing. He was an Indian from an impoverished family who had excelled in school and won scholarships to study in the United States, including getting business degrees and a PhD in human resources economics from Stanford University. He challenged Fujimori in 2000 when that election was boycotted by APRA and other major parties. In 2001 he ran again, competing with former president Alan García of APRA. He won with 52 percent of the vote against Garcia’s 48 percent. Toledo tried to give Peru a new beginning by calling a conference of leading political parties and social organizations to formulate a National Accord. And they agreed on general principles such as the rule of law, social justice, economic competitiveness and reversing Fujimori’s centralization of administrative power (St John 2010). Toledo stuck to a neoliberal economic model which produced strong economic growth, but without proportionate improvement in wages and employment. There was considerable discontent

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among public employees, but the government could not raise enough revenue to raise their wages because so much of the economy was “informal” and escaped taxation. Toledo did expand many health and social programs, including programs to help the indigenous population, but his accomplishments did not meet the very high expectations encouraged by his campaign promises. The leading candidates in the 2006 election were former president Alan García, of APRA, and Ollanta Humala, a nationalist military officer who had led an unsuccessful revolt against Fujimori in October 2000. García won the second round with 53 percent to Humala’s 47 percent. García was the APRA candidate, but by this time APRA had lost most of its organizational vitality and appealed primarily to middle-class urban voters. García’s economic policies continued in broadly the same vein as his predecessors, relying on the commodity boom of the 2000s to provide growth. At the same time, he was not able to translate this into stronger popularity owing to his government’s general lack of emphasis on social programs and a broad public view that the government was ineffective. In 2011, there were three respected candidates from the center-right political mainstream: former president Alejandro Toledo, his prime minister, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, and the mayor of Lima, Luis Castañeda. These three candidates split the more conservative vote, so none of them survived to the second round of the elections between the two top vote getters. These were Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori, Alberto Fujimori’s daughter. Alberto Fujimori had decided to try to return to Peru in 2005, stopping in Santiago, Chile, to test the waters. But the Chileans extradited him to Peru where he was charged with numerous human rights violations. He was tried and convicted of numerous offenses, and the judicial process was generally judged fair by impartial international observers. His supporters considered the prosecution a political persecution, and it was clear that he retained a reservoir of support from voters who admired his strength in suppressing the guerrilla movements and in stabilizing the economy, and which Keiko tapped into. Ollanta Humala, on the other hand, was supported by Hugo Chávez and frightened many in the middle and upper classes. Many middle-class voters supported Fujimori out of fear of Humala, but he successfully moved to the center, issuing an Agreement to Defend Democracy. He modelled his campaign on Lula da Silva of Brazil, not on Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, offering progressive rhetoric for the masses along with reassuring promises to the business classes. With this approach, he won with 52 percent of the vote to Keiko Fujimori’s 48 percent. As president, he maintained market-friendly or neoliberal economic policies while seeking to expand programs for the poor and minorities. He was helped by growing world prices for minerals, a key Peruvian export since the 1990s. However, by the mid-2010s the economic model was beginning to

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sputter as global demand and prices declined. This has made things difficult for Humala to govern; the Peruvian state has lacked sufficient infrastructure and tax revenues necessary to meet the vast social needs required by its population. Although Humala has overseen a small increase in spending on public services like health and education and sought to diversify the economy, he has so far failed to undertake labor reform, reduce regulation or reduce spending on big projects in favor of other issues like transport and Internet connectivity. In part, Humala’s weakness stems from the lack of a strong political party base, which is reflected in the six prime ministers he has appointed while in office (Economist 2016a). The two candidates who survived the first round of the 2016 presidential election were Pedro Paulo Kuczynski, a 77-year-old former Wall Street banker and World Bank economist, and Keiko Fujimori. Although Keiko Fujimori won the first round with 40 percent of the vote to Kuczynski’s 21 percent, she struggled in the run-off. Kuczynski was fortunate that two other candidates had been disqualified from standing before the first round, and he made up ground by focusing the campaign on whether or not Keiko would use a presidential pardon to free her father if elected. She promised not to do so, but suggested that the courts might be persuaded to free him. Kuczynski was also helped by a corruption scandal within Keiko’s party and winning the support of the third-place left-wing candidate, Verónika Mendoza. The two candidates differed in personality and style, but not much in substance. Like Fujimori, Toledo, García and Humala before them, both Kuczynski and Keiko were firmly committed to the neoliberal model, although the former was marginally more liberal on social issues. How little difference there was on such matters was reflected in the narrowness of the vote between them: several days passed after the poll before Kuczynski was confirmed to have won with 50.12 percent of the votes to Keiko’s 49.88 percent—a difference of just under 42,000 votes (Taj 2016). As he prepares to govern, he faces the challenge of Keiko’s supporters being a majority in Congress, prompting debate about how collaborative his presidency will be (Economist 2016b). The decline of party politics and the prominence of individuals has been a striking feature of Peruvian politics since the end of military rule and the collapse of APRA as an electoral vehicle. Although the process took shape under Alberto Fujimori during the 1990s, Roberts (2006, location 1235) observes that since 2001 “Peru appears to be mired in a pattern of iterated or ‘serial populism’ marked by a sequence of dominant personalities.” Other authors in the same volume (Carrión 2006) call it “neopopulism” or “electoral authoritarianism.” Regardless of the label, several characteristics of this regime are clear. The leaders appeal directly to a mass public with little intermediation by political parties or interest groups. The leaders are replaced in periodic elec-

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tions as specified in the constitution. The prefix “neo” distinguishes this model from classical populist movements which were usually based on support from peasants or other low-income groups, and which attacked monied elites. Classical populist movements also typically seek to perpetuate their founding leaders in power, while in Peru the norm has been to maintain limited presidential terms. All of Peru’s post-Fujimori leaders have adhered to a business-friendly economic model, irrespective of the social class basis of their support. Combining these traits, we have labeled the Peruvian political regime “serial neoliberal populism.” Superficially, at least, this model seems to be successful. Literary novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who lost his presidential campaign but won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2010, observed in 2015 that “never, since I can remember, has the image of my country been so positive in the rest of the world.” But he went on to say that the perspective is very different from within Peru where it appears to be “an exasperated country, on the brink of a ferocious fratricidal catastrophe” caused by political conflicts, strikes, corruption, drug traffickers, and social agitation (Vargas Llosa 2015). Certainly all these problems persist in Peruvian society, and it would be risky to dismiss the insights of such a sensitive observer. There are certainly many social problems. Remnants of the Shining Path still occasionally attack police posts, and leftist parties offer candidates in the elections. But Peruvians are averse to repeating their past experiences, and if discontent is bubbling beneath the surface, it has not found mass expression in a political movement. VENEZUELA Neoliberal Stabilization Failure, 1989–1998 Carlos Andrés Pérez had been a reasonably successful president from 1974 to 1979 under the Punto Fijo system which provided for a relatively stable sharing of power between the two main political parties. These parties had become extremely integrated with the state, creating a highly bureaucratic and corrupt structure. But as long as massive oil revenues were flowing in, the living was good in what was sometimes called Saudi Venezuela. But when Andrés Pérez was elected to a second term in 1989, the oil revenues were down, expenses were higher than ever, and the system was in crisis. He ran a populist campaign, denouncing the IMF and World Bank. Andrés Pérez sought to create a “modernizing” leadership and government made up of independent figures who could act independently of pressure from state employees, political parties and interest groups (Tanaka 2006, 58). Andrés Pérez took office on February 2, 1989. He believed he had to do something right away about the economic crisis and so he accepted the

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advice of mainstream economists and imposed a neoliberal stabilization program. This was in sharp contrast to his party’s more traditional statist model of development (Tanaka 2006, 58), and a complete reversal of his campaign rhetoric. The payoff for doing this was a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF, which he needed to pay the government’s bills while making payments on the massive public debt. But neoliberal stabilization was not what he had promised in his campaign and the public blamed him for selling out to the IMF and international capitalism. On February 27 massive demonstrations, riots, shootings and massacres broke out, an event that has become known as the Caracazo and which triggered the unraveling of the Punto Fijo system. People were fed up with both the major parties, viewing them as corrupt and ineffective. There were two coup attempts by military officers in 1992, both of which were suppressed. But the political crisis continued into the new year and Andrés Pérez was accused of embezzlement and suspended from office by a unanimous vote of Congress on May 21, 1993. Once removed from office, he was prosecuted for corruption by the Supreme Court. A special presidential election was held in 1993 and another former president, Rafael Caldera, was returned to office, even though he was not supported by the political party he had founded, COPEI. This time he ran as the candidate of an ad hoc coalition of 17 parties and expressed sympathy for those who had orchestrated the coups, reflecting the anti-system theme of his campaign (Tanaka 2006, 59). But he and his coalition had no real plan for dealing with the economic crisis, except not to accept advice from the IMF. So the financial problems accumulated and by the end of his mandate in 1998 the country was struggling with low oil prices, rising inflation, constrained business investment, price controls and continuing IMF pressure to cut the budget (Adams 2010, 369). Andrés Pérez and Rafael Caldera had both presented themselves as outsiders who would break with the system. Both were unable to deliver because they were part of a narrow establishment that depended on the patronage funded by oil revenue. They did not have a political base or revolutionary charisma or any other resource needed to overcome this. The stage was set for change, but it would not come from the political establishment. The Bolivarian Revolution and the Chavista Regime, 1998–2013 Change came from Hugo Chávez, who was elected to the presidency in 1998. Chávez was a career military officer from a working-class background who had first burst on the scene with an attempted coup against Carlos Andrés Pérez in 1992 (Gott 2011, Carroll 2013). He was arrested, but granted five minutes of television time in which he electrified the disaffected working and lower classes of the country with an inspiring speech in which he said he had

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only failed por ahora (for now). He spent two years in prison, which helped to build his image as the savior of the disposed. When Andrés Pérez was impeached, Chávez was pardoned by President Rafael Caldera, and Chávez was elected president in 1998. He was re-elected in 2000, 2006 and 2012. His presidency-for-life was cut short when he died of cancer in early 2013. Chávez defined himself as a Bolivarian (Conway 2003), and his rhetoric extolled Bolívar’s nationalist and anti-imperialist heroism. He portrayed Venezuela as the victim of a catastrophic assault by the neoliberal American empire, and promised a heroic struggle for renewal. He advocated “twentyfirst century socialism” and his rhetoric was in the tradition of Latin American populism (Hawkins 2010), which splits the world into good and evil, identifying the common people as good and elites, both domestic and foreign, as evil. Chávez claimed legitimacy based on winning elections, but he also criticized electoral democracy in favor of participatory democracy. He created parallel institutions, known as Missions, Bolivarian Circles, and Community Councils, to provide resources and services usually supplied by government. His Bolivarian Revolution has been criticized, not only by liberal democrats (Brewer-Carías 2010, Cannon 2009, Corrales and Penfold 2011), but also by many on the left such as Rafael Uzcátegui (2010) who see it as a form of state capitalism. Heinz Dietrich (2011), the leading theorist of “twenty-first century socialism,” became disillusioned and accused Chávez of abandoning the socialist cause. In response to Dietrich, Chávez exclaimed that “in Venezuela, socialism is and always will be, Christian and Bolivarian.” Whatever Chávez’s theoretical ideas may have been, his rhetoric and community development ventures won him strong support from many within the country and on the international left (Gott 2011, Ali 2006, Bruce 2008) who saw him as a leading hope for revival of the left in the post-Soviet world. The regime established by Chávez is usually just called the Chavista Regime because it does not fit neatly into standard political categories. Corrales and Penfold (2011) call it an electoral autocracy, a hybrid regime type that combines apparently democratic multi-party elections with authoritarian measures such as packing government offices with loyalists, denouncing the opposition as agents of a foreign power, using government resources to build “civic society” groups that take over state functions, manipulating electoral rules to favor the government party, censoring or closing critical media, organizing armed groups of supporters to harass opponents, and dubious legal prosecutions of opposition activists. Under the Chavista Regime, Venezuelan society became sharply polarized along social class lines (Mainwaring et al. 2006, 2). Critics, mostly from the middle and upper classes, complain of high crime rates, inflation, consumer shortages, and threats to freedom of the press and of assembly. He was briefly overthrown in a coup in 2002, but his supporters rallied to restore him

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to power. Opponents then tried to remove him with a recall election in 2004, but 58 percent of the voters rejected the recall. He survived a strike by state oil company employees. All of this was possible because of his immense popularity with the poor and the working class. Chávez presented himself to the public as a second incarnation of Bolívar, but he was a much better politician. By Bolivarian, he meant that he was leading a struggle against foreign oppression, particularly against the United States. He famously called US President George W. Bush a devil in a United Nations speech. While the United States was certainly happy about the 2002 coup attempt, and favored removing Chávez, it mostly just ignored him. Venezuela’s main importance to the United States is as a source of petroleum, and despite the rhetoric, Venezuela was in no position to cut off its major market. Especially when oil prices were down and US production was up. While he liked to cite Bolivar, Chávez was actually more similar to another former president, Juan Vicente Gómez (discussed in the last chapter). Gómez also seized power at a time when the system was in crisis, disdained democracy, and saw in his own person the country’s salvation. He depended on oil revenue to win loyalty to his regime. He promoted constitutional changes to strengthen the role of the presidency over Congress and to allow himself to be re-elected indefinitely. He was also strongly opposed by many middle-class intellectuals and democracy activists. But, of course, there are also differences. Gómez was a conservative, and in some ways deserved the adjective Bolivarian more than Chávez. But he was also a successful dictator who suppressed the caudillos and presided over a relatively orderly society. He had no interest in educating the masses, believing that “an ignorant people is a docile people.” He also had no problem with foreign oil companies, seeing them as essential to exploiting that resource. Economically, the Chavista Regime relied entirely on petroleum revenue. Chávez even referred to his regime as “petroleum socialism” and said that “this is our model, to rely on petroleum riches” (Uzcátegui 2010, location 2522). Countries around the world that rely on the easy riches of “The Oil Curse” (Ross 2012) tend to be less economically stable and less democratic than comparable countries without this temptation. In the Chavista model, critics argue, the oil riches provided benefits to the poor whereas in the past they went mostly to the middle and upper classes. But this was at the expense of social disorder, class conflict and high crime rates, and without building the framework for a lasting alternative that does not depend on oil revenues. Political and Economic Crisis, 2013–Present Arguably the greatest challenge to the Chavista Regime remained the same as that facing the Punto Fijo system: its reliance on petroleum revenue. This problem became acute when Chávez became ill with cancer and died in

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2013. His successor, Nicolás Maduro, insisted that he was loyal to Chávez’s principles, but lacked his charismatic appeal. Maduro inherited all of the problems of the Chavista model, including the polarization of society, rising crime and violence, plus the additional burden of the collapse of global oil prices in 2014. In response, the Maduro government adopted an even more heavy-handed attitude towards the opposition, including the closure of critical media and arresting and imprisoning vocal critics. In December 2015, congressional elections were scheduled and held and the opposition Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (Democratic Unity Roundtable, or MUD) won decisively, taking control of Congress from the Chavista Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Venezuelan Socialist Party, or PSUV). But the PSUV packed the Supreme Court with new justices before the new Congress convened, and the administration has used control of the judiciary to keep the Congress from freeing political prisoners or making fundamental changes. As the store shelves emptied, Maduro appointed a sociologist, Luis Salas, as economy minister. Salas had a brief moment of fame when journalists discovered a pamphlet he had written in which he claimed that “inflation does not exist in the real world . . . when a person goes into a place and finds that prices have gone up, he is not in the presence of ‘inflation’” (El Comercio Economía 2016). This was the idea that José Sarney had in Brazil: inflation is due to greedy merchants. The Chavista television stations went so far as to show empty store shelves with better stocked warehouses, but that wasn’t the problem. Government efforts to supply necessities to the poor at subsidized prices also ran into problems, often because of corrupt officials who smuggled goods to Colombia to sell at market prices. After a month in office, Luis Salas left to spend more time with his family. During the first half of 2016 Maduro appeared to be a president under siege. The government found it difficult to pay its bills and cut public sector workers’ working week from five days to two, in an effort to save power. Growing numbers of voters expressed frustration with the government’s performance; by May around 70 percent wanted Maduro to go. A month earlier, in April, the opposition claimed its petition to hold a recall referendum on the president had received 600,000 signatures, more than three times the number necessary under the constitution. However, the electoral body has been accused of going slowly in its verification of the names and thereby siding with the government; if a referendum takes place in the last two years of a presidential term, then rather than new elections, the vice president takes over (BBC News 2016, Ulmer and Pons 2016). A couple of weeks later Maduro declared a two-month state of emergency, ignoring the opposition-controlled National Assembly, which declared the move illegal. With growing polarization between government and opposition and Maduro’s increasing authoritarianism, it is uncertain what the

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future holds for Venezuela (BBC News 2016, Ulmer and Pons 2016). But regardless of when the referendum takes place, it seems likely that Venezuela will remain sharply polarized along social class lines, so any president will have a difficult challenge achieving enough consensus to govern effectively. CHILE The Pinochet Regime, 1973–1989 The 1973 military coup destroyed the Revolution in Liberty regime launched by the Christian Democrats led by Eduardo Frei and advanced by the Popular Unity Coalition led by Salvador Allende. The military regime that replaced it fundamentally transformed Chile’s political system, economy and society. The instigator and chief architect of this regime was the senior army officer who muscled his way past his colleagues to acquire personal power: Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was a career military officer whose education was in the military academy and who also served as a professor in the academy. He was something of a military intellectual, studying geopolitics and editing an institutional magazine. Salvador Allende appointed him as commander in chief of the army in August 1973. He was in that office less than a month when he led a movement to overthrow Allende. Pinochet was not a charismatic leader, but a master of political manipulation. He was one of the leaders of a broad movement within the military, with considerable support from the middle and upper classes and many political leaders, that removed Allende from power. Over time, Pinochet was to maneuver himself into a position where he became Chile’s primary ruler. Decree 527 invested all power in Pinochet; between 1973 and 1976 he was a military dictator (Adams 2010, 227). The regime was ruthless in suppressing its opponents. Several thousand activists were killed and many more imprisoned and human rights were suppressed. The primary ideological focus of the regime was anti-communism and maintaining traditional social order. Supporting the process was the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Army Intelligence Directorate, or DINA), which at its height included 50,000 employees and informants (Adams 2010, 227). Pinochet sought to forcibly change Chile’s unstable political scene. This became especially apparent with the regime’s lurch to the right and imposition of a neoliberal shock program on the country’s economy and society. However, this did not occur immediately. Initially his support base came from the socially conservative sector of Chilean society, many of whom were found in the country’s elite and including a number of civilian politicians. Their primary concern was with the reestablishment of order and stability.

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In a meeting one month after seizing power in 1973, Pinochet referred to the “Portalian spirit which lights this room, in which the entire people has fused together, in pursuit of peace and progress” (Pinochet 1973). Pinochet was not content to rule from behind the scenes like Diego Portales, but he did follow Portales’ example in appointing a commission to write a new constitution, which was ratified in a plebiscite on September 11, 1980. It provided for military rule until 1988 when the military would nominate a single candidate to be approved (or not) by the people in a referendum. Much has been made of the fact that the Pinochet government adopted a neoliberal shock program to transform the economy back to a free market model. The generals believed that Allende’s management had undermined the economy and was putting the country on a path to socialism. They wanted to stabilize the economy, to reduce the uncertainty and wide fluctuations in prices and accompanying inflation. But they did not have an economic plan, and they needed one. It turned out that a group of economists at the Catholic University in Santiago had prepared one and were ready to go. The economists were later labelled the “Chicago Boys” because some of them had been educated at the University of Chicago. But the Chicago Boys were Chileans who had studied abroad, not Americans. They were also true believers in market fundamentalist economic theory, especially as taught by economist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago. The military coup and the closed political system gave them an opportunity to test their theories in the real world after 1975. Chile’s was one of the first neoliberal shock programs, and the effects were brutal. Inflation did come down, but so did employment, production and wages. In 1982 a catastrophic series of bank failures forced the government to nationalize the two biggest banks. Protests and demonstrations revived, under the leadership of independent social movements. In 1982 a group of businesspeople issued the Valdivia Proclamation, blaming the government’s economic decision making for causing a decline in production and transfer of capital to the financial system (Dávila 2013, 171). The following year GDP fell by 14.5 percent and unemployment had risen to 19 percent while wages remained low; indeed they remained below 1970 levels until 1992 (Adams 2010, 226, 227). Increasingly, businesspeople, who had been one of the elements of the Pinochet coalition, began to wonder whether Chile’s economy might not be better served through democracy. Pinochet had no interest in cutting back on political repression, but he was willing to change the economic policy. In 1985 the Chicago Boys were replaced by a more pragmatic mainstream economist, Hernán Büchi, who took steps to revive the economy. This is where the concept “neoliberalism” is not helpful, since both the Chicago Boys and Büchi were considered neoliberals. Since 1985 the Chilean economy has performed exceptionally well for Latin America, and economists disagree about the effects of the

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neoliberal shock program. Milton Friedman says neoliberal shock was a “miracle” that paved the way for the successes of the later period. But critics point out that the economy only took off when the shock program was relaxed, and argue that more moderate policies could have been equally successful and much less painful. Political parties had been banned by the Pinochet government. But the economic difficulties of the 1980s led to protests and demonstrations led by social movements and organizations, since political parties remained banned in this period. As the protests continued, and living conditions continued to deteriorate, the opposition became bolder. In 1985 many on the left joined with the Christian Democrats in a National Accord for Democracy; two years later the bulk of the country’s political parties were legalized (Herrera 2005). The Concertación Period, 1990–2010 As obligated to do under the 1980 constitution, the government called a yes or no vote on whether Pinochet should be given another eight-year term. This provision turned out to be a major mistake for the military because the yes or no referendum encouraged the opposition to unite, rather than arguing among themselves. The major centrist and leftist parties, including the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, formed the Concertación por el No (the Coalition to Vote No) and they won with 54.5 percent of the vote. Pinochet resisted standing down, but pressure from his own constituency led him to concede and accept a continuing role as commander in chief of the armed forces and senator for life. He warned his presidential successor not to make any military appointments which upset him and ordered soldiers on the street in Santiago periodically after 1990 (Adams 2010, 229). In 1989, Chile had presidential and congressional elections. The opposition remained unified as the Concertación. The candidate was Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, a respected law professor and former senator who had led the congressional opposition to the Salvador Allende government and had signed a congressional act in 1973 asking the military to “help re-establish the rule of law.” But he had become active in the democratic movement in the late 1970s and had the trust of the major socialist groups. The unity of the center and the major left groups has held in Chilean politics since 1989. In 1994, the presidential election was won by Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, the son of Eduardo Frei Montalva, who had been president from 1964 to 1970. He was succeeded in 2000 by Ricardo Lagos of the Partido por la Democracia (Party for Democracy, PPD), a party that he founded in 1987 (and which enabled former Socialists like Lagos to circumvent the ban on their party during the 1980s) and that was part of the Concertación. The Concertación governments between 1990 and 2010 adopted a constrained and limited approach to government, which sought to

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reduce the prospect of conflict with other political actors and to maintain the course of democratic consolidation (Siavelis 2000, 191). This reflected Pinochet’s legacy, which was aided by the continuing presence of Pinochet as chief of the armed forces (until 1997) and subsequently senator for life on the one hand; but more importantly because of the fixed nature of the changes wrought through the regime’s 1980 constitution. It required an extremely high threshold to overturn and—owing to the electoral system’s bias towards the right—was almost impossible to achieve. After Chile’s return to democracy, the political system appeared largely frozen between two main blocs, one combining the center-left and the other on the center-right. From 1989 to 2009 the center-left-controlled Concertación coalition, based primarily on the Christian Democrat and the Socialist parties, was able to hold the presidency. These governments were notable for their moderation. While they ensured electoral dominance for the center-left, they arguably weakened the influence of more radical groups on the left, including the communists. Scholars have developed three different interpretations of this period, according to Alan Angell (2014, x–xiv). One argues that the Concertación governments have made little difference, with the main changes stemming from the Pinochet period. Another suggests that Concertación governments have broadly followed the Pinochet model, reflecting its leadership’s commitment to the social and economic policies associated with it. The third— which Angell is most persuaded by—suggests that it is the incomplete nature of Chilean democracy which has constrained the Concertación governments from developing an alternative economic and social alternative, or changing its base. In early 2006, when the Concertación’s fourth president, Michelle Bachelet, took office, Chilean social movement activists were feeling more and more frustrated with the moderation of the Concertación. Soon after her inauguration, her government was caught unawares by massive protests, demonstrations and occupations by secondary school students in 2006 who condemned the poor quality of Chile’s schools. Her democratic rhetoric was therefore put to the test and a broadly constituted national commission to investigate the limitations of the education system was established. While the resulting recommendations and subsequent government policies were broadly shared by the political right on one side and the Concertación’s base in the center and left on the other, it was not enough to satisfy an emerging social base among the young and left who had wanted to see constitutional reforms relating to education and who felt overlooked by the wider political system.

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Social Challenges to the Neoliberal Model, 2010–Present In 2009 the Concertación found itself facing a stronger challenge from both the left and the young. In addition, it was saddled with an uninspiring candidate in former president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, who seemed likely to bring more of the same. The Chilean electorate handed victory to the centerright candidate, Sebastián Piñera, who came from the more dynamic entrepreneurial sector of his coalition. Piñera’s victory was aided by developments in the Chilean right since 1989. The right-wing Alianza coalition between two political parties (the conservative Unión Democráta Independiente and Piñera’s more catch-all, liberally inclined Renovación Nacional) had become more electorally oriented during the 1990s, running the Concertación close in the 1999 and 2005 elections. The Alianza adopted a more moderate and centrist position to appeal to centrists in the electorate, leading to Piñera’s victory (Navia and Godoy 2014). Piñera’s administration did not make any significant changes to the political system, the economy or the provision of social policies. During his first year he was feted for a can-do attitude, which was exemplified by his government’s rescue of a group of trapped miners which received widespread international attention. However, under the surface there were growing social ruptures which had begun in the mid-2000s. By 2011 many of the secondary school students who had gained their first experience of demonstrations and protests regarding the poor quality of Chile’s schools were not prepared to remain quiet. Now at university and unhappy with the education system as a whole, massive student demonstrations took place during that year known as the Chilean Winter (Villalobos-Ruminott 2012). Among the issues they demanded fixed were the high costs of university education, as well as problems with public transportation and constitutional reform. While some of the Concertación viewed the protestors as hotheads, others recognized that the students and their supporters were not fleeting and would become a more established feature of the Chilean political system. In February 2012 there was a 40-day mobilization by people living in the remote community of Aysén, who felt marginalized. Opinion polls indicated strong support for public protest (Delamaza 2015, 268). Bachelet appeared to acknowledge this when she decided to stand for election again in 2013; in contrast to her 2005 election campaign, she was more explicit that the political system needed reform. At the same time, she built a broader electoral coalition, based on the Concertación but including members of these activist groups (Delamaza 2015, 268). This resulted in the Nueva Mayoría (New Majority) coalition. Bachelet was elected with over 62 percent of the vote. As she began her second term of office as president, the general consensus was that the broader political system recognized the necessity for change, but

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that the outcome was not certain (Delamaza 2015, Angell 2014, Hellinger 2011). Indeed, as Bachelet’s second term unfolded, it was becoming clear that the reform agenda had stalled and that she was becoming increasingly unpopular as a result: in August 2015 72 percent of voters disapproved of her performance—higher than the 68 percent who criticized Piñera during the worst month of the student protests in 2011 (Benedikter et al. 2016). Despite reform of the tax system and more public spending in education, other proposed reforms to the pension and health systems and labor organization were being held up in Congress. Instead of undertaking structural reform of these sectors, Bachelet proposed to increase spending to even out inequalities while also pushing back the timetable for reforming Pinochet’s 1980 constitution into the next presidency. Bachelet’s problems came from both inside and outside government; in addition to the right-wing opposition, she also faced difficulties from her own side. The broad coalition which had swept her to electoral victory was becoming frayed as Christian Democrats and communists faced off against each other over the acceptable level of inequality and issues like abortion (Lombrana 2016). CONCLUSION The era of neoliberal globalization can be dated to Margaret Thatcher’s election as prime minister of the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency of the United States in 1980. As it progressed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, the neoliberal shock program in Poland, and the adoption of capitalist economics in China, it seemed to some that “history had ended” (Fukuyama 1992). Free market economics and multi-party democracy had proven their superiority to any of the credible alternatives, and it was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Of course, it wasn’t that simple. Jihadist militancy in the Middle East showed that religious and cultural differences still mattered. China showed that free market economics did not necessarily lead to political democracy. But the clash of civilizations thesis (Huntington 2011) did not readily apply to Latin America, which is predominately Christian and governed by the descendants of European settlers. Resistance to neoliberalism was nevertheless strong in Latin America because of the strength of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideologies. Neoliberalism was more of a default setting for policymakers in the United States, where belief in private enterprise and small government goes back to the founding fathers. The role of the state had expanded for pragmatic reasons, to deal with the growth of monopolies, the crisis of the Great De-

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pression and the demands of World War II. But by the 1980s, there was a widespread feeling that the state had grown too large and it was time to return to the country’s roots. No US president has failed to support market economics, although there have been real policy contrasts, such as that between the budget balancing of the Clinton years and the increased defense spending and financial bailouts of the Bush years. Both Democratic and Republican presidents have sought the support of entrepreneurs and their interest groups in Washington. And, with the exception of the Civil War, Americans have used multi-party elections to select their presidents, waiting patiently for the next regular election even when they were eager to get rid of the incumbent. In Latin American political discourse, neoliberal economics is often stigmatized by association with the “Chicago Boys” of the first few years of the Pinochet regime in Chile. But this was only one exceptional example, and its extreme economic policies did not last long even in Chile. In Brazil neoliberalism began with privatization and opening to global markets during the Fernando Collor government. Currency stabilization, another element of neoliberalism, was begun during Itamar Franco’s presidency and institutionalized during Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s two terms as president. The neoliberal economic model pioneered by Collor and Cardoso was continued by Lula da Silva, especially in his first term. All of these were democratic, postmilitary regime presidents, and Lula da Silva was the favorite of the democratic left. In Mexico, neoliberal economics was institutionalized by the same OneParty Dominance regime which had institutionalized statist development after the revolution. It was done by presidents with advanced degrees in economics from US universities. After all the chaos and killing of the revolution, Mexico had returned to rule by scientific technocrats, updated versions of the cientificos of the Porfiriato. In Argentina neoliberalism was institutionalized ineffectively by Carlos Menem, rejected by the Kirchners, and is now being reinstated by Mauricio Macri, all democratically elected. In Peru it was installed by the Fujimori dictatorship, but retained by the serial populists who have succeeded him. In Chile a pragmatic form of neoliberalism was retained by the successive democratic governments after the end of the Pinochet regime. In the United States, there was no economic crisis that forced the shift to neoliberalism. People were exhausted from the debacle of the Vietnam War, the youth radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the racial uprisings in the inner cities. They were ready for a change, and Ronald Reagan promised one with a cheerful and charismatic communication style. And he appealed to themes that were always strong in US culture. In Latin America, neoliberalism came in response to economic crises, not thanks to a charismatic president or an ideological movement. Latin

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American political culture has always been sympathetic to the idea of a strong state, given the history of chaos and caudillos. And for almost half a century the developmental state had achieved many successes. But its inclusive appeal led to demands for greater and greater inputs, much of which had to be financed by loans, even in Venezuela with all its oil revenues. It became more and more difficult to service the loans and finance economic development and growth at the same time, leading to debt defaults and hyperinflation. The revolutionary movements seeking a Cuban model had been crushed, so there was no alternative but to make capitalism work. In some cases, neoliberalism came from leaders, such as Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela, Carlos Menem in Argentina and Lula da Silva in Brazil, who used populist and developmentalist rhetoric in their campaigns but shifted to neoliberalism when in office. In the Chilean case, it came earlier in response to a political crisis caused by the Allende government overplaying its hand. Although economic concerns were present in the Pinochet regime’s deliberations, they were secondary to a mission to eradicate the “socialism” of the Allende period and the prospect of any challenge to capitalism. In Brazil and in Mexico, neoliberal measures came from technocrats who presented specific pragmatic measures as solutions to crises. In every case, the population was supportive just as long as the policies were working to generate economic growth (Guimarães 2015, location 187). This was true even in Chile when the democrats, despite their bitter hatred for the military regime, accepted the successful parts of its economic model. The crisis of the developmental model did not mean a complete reversal from the past. Some governments, particularly in Brazil, Peru and Argentina, persisted with the old way of doing things throughout the 1980s before eventually opting for more liberal policies and especially the then fashionable fixed exchange rate. The same could be said of Venezuela, although here the issue was not an inability to repay debt but rather a decline in oil revenues on which the regime had become dependent, and the consequent weakening of its capacity to control the political system. Indeed, the situation had deteriorated to such an extent in that country that even formerly successful presidents, Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez, found themselves unable to restart the model. Colombia was something of an exception because, unlike most other countries in the region, its economy was already largely open during the 1980s. As a result, although there was a regional economic downturn, it did not hit the country as hard. Instead, governments were more concerned with other matters, principally how to respond to the weakness of the state and the advances that guerrillas and drug gangs had taken. The introduction of neoliberalism occurred as much of Latin America was going through a process of political democratization, despite the fact that the impulse for it came from the technocrats and the economic elites. In

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contrast to the earlier period of state building, during the 1980s–1990s military and authoritarian rule was in retreat as new social groups and political parties became more noticeable and demanding. Military rule ended in the Southern Cone, while in Mexico, Venezuela, and Colombia, ossified political systems of elite accommodation and power sharing became increasingly exposed as elections became more competitive. As a result, the base of the regions’ governments changed. Whereas earlier presidents had been able to organize political parties or movements around them using corporatist structures and organizations, now presidents had to appeal to different voters at both elite and mass levels. Initially, this was achieved by presidents who promised financial and economic stabilization programs as a response to the uncertainties unleashed by the “lost decade” during the 1980s such as job losses, falling incomes and rising inflation. This contributed to the election of presidents who aimed to carry out structural adjustment programs. Many of the presidents in the early neoliberal period sought to distinguish themselves from previous governments by claiming the mantle of “outsiders”; Brazil’s Fernando Collor, Peru’s Alberto Fujimori, Argentina’s Carlos Menem, and Andrés Pérez in Venezuela all painted themselves in this fashion, even though some (Menem, Pérez) had links to long-established parties. So neoliberal or market-friendly economics has not been tied to a particular political regime, nor has it been universally accepted. There has been significant resistance in all the Latin American countries, especially among youth and left activists. This is expressed globally in the meetings of the World Social Forum, first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. Its motto is “another world is possible,” by which it means something other than neoliberal globalization. Lula da Silva spoke at the World Social Forum immediately after his election in 2003, but he then immediately went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and his economic policies as president of Brazil were closer to the neoliberals than the opposite. The president who was closest to the World Social Forum’s approach was Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. He was the leader of a backlash against neoliberalism in the 2000s, which has included the Kirchners in Argentina, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. All of them have been stronger in opposing neoliberalism than they have been in articulating an alternative. These regimes depend on charismatic leaders who seek to rule for one term after another, although in the Kirchner’s case, the plan was to alternate husband and wife. Their rhetoric is often vague and utopian, with a paucity of specifics, as in the case of Hugo Chávez’s advocacy of “twenty-first-century socialism” without ever specifying how the means of production would be managed in such a society. These anti-neoliberal presidents have promised a fairer redistribution of national wealth and a more balanced relationship between market-oriented growth and society’s needs. In addition to the Kirchners, Lula da Silva, and

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Hugo Chávez, these very popular goals have been emphasized by the Concertación presidents in Chile and the serial neoliberal populist presidents of Peru. All combined elements of neoliberal economics with versions of populist rhetoric. But whereas an earlier generation had been inspired by the ideology of Soviet socialism and the Cuban Revolution, much of the language used by these leaders suggested a return to the past of the developmental state. With the exception of Hugo Chávez, who relied entirely on oil revenues, their language was more restrained and managerial and they emphasized a more scientific or technical approach to reducing poverty. It echoed some of the features of an earlier age: the order and progress of the “positivists” during the time of national consolidation at the end of the nineteenth century. There is broad agreement, not just in Latin America but in the world as a whole, on the goal of combining economic growth with measures to lessen inequality and advance the welfare of the least advantaged. Even in the United States, the strength of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party presidential primary in 2016 revealed surprisingly strong support, especially among youth, for previously taboo “democratic socialist” rhetoric. Actually achieving these goals requires a pragmatic balancing act between policies that stimulate investment and productivity and urgently needed improvements in social, educational and health programs. Resources are never sufficient to meet all legitimate needs. It is difficult to acknowledge the need for hard choices, so presidential candidates tend to make claims that cannot be realistically achieved, or to resort to vague shibboleths. Then their followers are disillusioned when the promises cannot be kept. The impeachment of Dilma Rousseff came because the economy collapsed under her watch, not because the opposition opposed redistributing money to the poor. Economic failure also explains the collapse of Menem’s neoliberalism in Argentina and the opposition triumph in the congressional elections in Venezuela in 2015. The more successful regimes, such as the post-military governments in Chile, Serial Neoliberal Populism in Peru, and Colombia’s Multi-Party Democracy, have succeeded in achieving significant growth and gradual social improvement. But that success may not be inspirational enough to meet the needs of those, especially young people, who feel a need for a more dramatic regime change.

Chapter Eight

Conclusion: The Transformational Presidents of the Americas

The presidency is a constitutionally created office that can be occupied by any citizen who meets minimum requirements; it is beyond both time and place. Although its powers and responsibilities are defined and constrained by law, the president is not a bureaucrat who is expected to only follow rules or a jurist whose responsibility is to impartially interpret the law. To be a success, he or she must inspire and motivate others, not just exercise legal powers. The president is praised when things go well and blamed when things go poorly as if he or she had much broader powers than constitutions actually provide. For this reason, the character of the individual who holds the office makes a critical difference. In chapter 2 we used a content analysis of history books to identify the outstanding leaders of the Americas. The result was two tables, one for the United States and another for Latin America (in appendices A and B) which rank the presidents along with other political leaders according to the number of pages on which they are mentioned. The top ten for the United States were Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, George Washington, George W. Bush, William Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt. For Latin America, the ten mentioned on the most pages were Simón Bolivar, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Porfirio Díaz, Getúlio Vargas, Salvador Allende, Juan Perón, Augusto Pinochet, Lula da Silva, and Emiliano Zapata. Including only ten from Latin America is not quite fair because Latin America includes so many countries, but there is no logical place to cut the list. For the full lists, see appendices A and B. Of course, the writers of history books were not tasked to list the most outstanding or transformational leaders. They were telling a story, so they 211

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emphasized the leaders who played the most dramatic roles whether they were heroes or villains, winners or losers. They also tended to emphasize recent years, which is probably why George W. Bush and Lula da Silva got as much attention as they did. Another approach would be to survey historians and ask them who the most transformational leaders were. Several scholars have done this for the United States and the results are similar to our content analysis. No one has done such a survey for Latin America or, so far as we know, for any Latin American country. Many experts specialize in one country or region, so country-wide surveys would probably be more valid. Instead of undertaking this project, we decided to rely on the content analysis of history books and then compare it to our own qualitative judgment based on the historical materials we have read. This analysis covers all of Latin America, even though the historical chapters in this book cover only seven Latin American countries. We have read histories of the other countries, and published elsewhere on some of them. We will seek to identify presidents who were “transformational” in the sense that Burns used the term or “reconstructive” in the sense that Skowronek defined it. These terms are not quite the same, but close enough for this purpose. They were defined in the Introduction to this book. This is not a list of the presidents we like the most, or whose values and aspirations were closest to our own. It is our judgment of which leaders made a lasting impact on their countries or of the region as a whole. This is inevitably a qualitative judgment; it cannot be reduced to numbers. But it is a judgment rooted in our reading of the history of the republics in question. Fidel Castro made a famous speech called “History Will Absolve Me.” Like Castro, most leaders hope that history will judge them positively. But there is no History with a capital H; there is never a definitive historical judgment. There is only the set of judgments of people who write and read history. We seek to add our judgment to the list and welcome feedback from others. One source of guidance in this task is the literature on “transformational” or “great” presidents that was discussed in chapter 2, much of which was about US presidents. We noted that there were three main features associated with being “transformational”: • Political innovation at times of political crisis • Establishing a new political consensus • Institutionalization of political changes We do not, however, use the term “great,” because it is ambiguous. It can mean good, but it can also mean large or powerful, as in a great storm or a great war or even a great evil. We therefore draw on the terms used by James MacGregor Burns and Stephen Skowronek, whose work guided our under-

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standing of leadership and “political time.” As Burns defined it, “transformational” leaders are those who push against the confines of the environment in which they have to operate, challenging and changing it. As Skowronek defined it, “reconstructive” leaders are those who caused a major shift in the political “regime” that lasted for a period of “political time.” Burns’ concept is more general than Skowronek’s, both of which were developed to fit US history. We did not find that Latin American presidencies went through the fairly regular cycles that Skowronek found in his work on the United States, but we did find regular shifts in the political regime. We have been guided by both theories in making our selection of transformational leaders. We adopted a broad approach to what constituted innovation during crisis by transformational leadership. It could be the introduction of a new policy program or package, like FDR’s New Deal or Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. However, it is not enough that it is merely introduced; it has to result in lasting change by becoming institutionalized into the political system and outlasting an individual president’s term in office—indeed his own political (and perhaps biological) lifetime. At the same time, such change reveals a president’s or political leader’s capacity to either lead or harness the emergence of new social and economic forces, whose rise challenge and undermine the prevailing political order. Although the above criteria are useful in deciding which were the “transformational” presidents and other political leaders, we acknowledge that the process can never be completely objective; any evaluation which requires an appreciation of the individual’s personality, actions and the context in which he or she operated, will be more subjective. Our approach is different from much of the literature on the subject, which is more narrowly concerned with “great” US presidents and which has become increasingly quantified in recent decades. As a result, our evaluation runs the risk of the same criticism made of earlier efforts in this mold: that it is subject to bias and may say more about us as authors than the individuals we have studied. As Nelson (1989, 1996) noted, scholars are influenced by memorials, history, etc. At the same time, no two presidents ever faced the same set of circumstances. Acknowledging this does not mean that any judgment is meaningless. Insofar as we are aware, our evaluation of American presidents (both north and south of the Rio Grande) is the first of its kind. We hope it will stimulate further debate, enquiry and analysis. THE TRANSFORMATIONAL PRESIDENTS OF THE AMERICAS Without further ado, our list of the transformational presidents of the Americas is in table 8.1. It is organized by historical era, not by country. The individuals who are excluded are often even more interesting than those who

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are included, so we have listed the top leaders from the statistical tally from each period in the third column. ERA OF INDEPENDENCE Including George Washington for the independence era is obvious, but excluding Simón Bolívar is not. Of course, historians had to give him a great deal of attention, but his importance was primarily as a military leader. As a political leader, he failed to transform his society, or his societies, leaving them a chaotic mess. The Mexican and Argentine leaders Antonio López de Santa Anna and Juan Manuel de Rosas were not included for the same reason. While each dominated their country’s politics, Santa Anna was unable to consolidate his rule while Rosas’ dictatorship did not last beyond himself.

Table 8.1. “Transformational” Presidents and Political Leaders in the Americas Era

Burton & Goertzel

Content Analysis

Independence

George Washington (US)

Simón Bolívar (Gran Colombia) George Washington (US)

National Consolidation

Ramón Castilla (Peru) Thomas Jefferson (US) Benito Juárez (Mexico) Abraham Lincoln (US) Dom Pedro II (Brazil) Diego Portales (Chile) Rafael Reyes (Colombia)

Porfirio Díaz (Mexico) Andrew Jackson (US) Thomas Jefferson (US) Abraham Lincoln (US)

State Development

Lázaro Cárdenas (Mexico) Fidel Castro (Cuba) Juan Gómez (Venezuela) Raúl Haya de la Torre (Peru) Juan Perón (Argentina) Franklin D. Roosevelt (US) Theodore Roosevelt (US) Getúlio Vargas (Brazil)

Salvador Allende (Chile) Fidel Castro (Cuba) Juan Perón (Argentina) Franklin D. Roosevelt (US) Theodore Roosevelt (US) Harry Truman (US) Getúlio Vargas (Brazil)

Neoliberal Globalization and After

Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil) Hugo Chávez (Venezuela) Augusto Pinochet (Chile) Ronald Reagan (US)

George W. Bush (US) Hugo Chávez (Venezuela) William Clinton (US) Augusto Pinochet (Chile) Ronald Reagan (US) Lula da Silva (Brazil)

Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

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ERA OF NATIONAL CONSOLIDATION In the era of national consolidation, we include Jefferson and Lincoln, following the judgment of Skowronek and other historians. Jefferson was instrumental in establishing the practice of alternating rule by presidents from different political parties, and in incorporating a larger proportion of the white male population in the polity. Lincoln not only held the country together through the successful prosecution of the Civil War, he transformed the country through the emancipation of the slaves. We exclude Andrew Jackson because we see him more as the consequence than as the instigator of changing social, economic and political dynamics in the United States during the 1820s and 1830s. As an aside, we note that he is also becoming less popular in the United States due to his racism and mistreatment of Native Americans, and he is to be removed from the $20 bill. This is not the reason for our not including him, however, because our list includes leaders who transformed things for the worse. We do not fault the historians for using terms such as “The Age of Jackson” since he certainly symbolized the dominant political culture of the age even if he did not create it. Only one Latin American leader from the era of national consolidation made the list in the content analysis of history books: Porfirio Díaz. He gave his name to a historical regime, but was unable to ensure the survival of the regime beyond his lifetime. We have not included him as a transformational leader because of the abrupt failure of his regime. It might be argued that the One-Party Dominance regime that followed The Revolution and The Maximato was a resumption of the technocratic regime he had created. But that was really a re-creation which we credit to Lázaro Cárdenas after more than a decade of chaos and political instability. We list Benito Juárez, Ramón Castilla, Rafael Reyes, Diego Portales, and Dom Pedro II as transformational leaders of the era of national consolidation. In the statistical content analysis, Juárez was ranked 46, Reyes 107, Portales 54, and Dom Pedro II 25. Castilla did not meet the ranking criteria, although he provided a period of relatively stable government during a period of economic growth through guano production and bookended by internal and external conflict. In Colombia, Reyes brought Liberals and Conservatives together, thereby reducing tension between the two main parties in that country and providing the forerunner to the National Front governments later in the twentieth century and after sporadic periods of violence and instability. Like Lincoln, Juárez won a war and began a process of reform in Mexico which lasted until the Porfiriato dictatorship. In this case Mexico was luckier than the United States in keeping its leader alive. We have not ranked the transformational leaders, but if we did, we would rank Benito Juárez very high.

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As a strongman, Portales ensured the relatively early consolidation of the Chilean state, in marked contrast to most of its neighbors. Even following his death and the contested elections and outbreaks of political violence during the 1850s and 1860s, Chile acquired the reputation of the most stable country in the region, eventually being dubbed the “England of South America.” A similar claim might be made for Dom Pedro II in Brazil as well. Although not a president like many of the other leaders we have studied, when he took power formally, Brazil was in relative chaos and could well have broken apart. While he certainly failed a key test—namely that the monarchical regime he was associated with did not outlast him—his reign was transformational in that it contributed to long-term stability, and many of the subsequent political and cultural patterns which became prominent in Brazil were established during his rule, persisting both into The First Republic regime which succeeded him and beyond. One of the most notable of these was— ironically—a commitment to constitutional rule. Indeed, the coup which overthrew Dom Pedro II was the result of a narrow intra-elite split rather than the result of a polarized society, and following the brief upheaval, politics settled down quickly again. From then on, later leaders and the political class would continue to stress their commitment to constitutional rule (including the military regime after 1964 and the supporters of the impeachment process against Dilma Rousseff in 2015–2016). ERA OF STATE DEVELOPMENT We list Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, both of whom are also listed in the content analysis of history books. We do not list Harry Truman as a transformational president although he does make the top ten in the content analysis. He did not establish a new political regime or transform the US economy or society; he was the heir to FDR’s legacy in that regard. Rather, his significance owes much to his leadership at the time the United States entered onto the world stage and the navigation of his country during the early years of the Cold War. For Latin America Getúlio Vargas, Juan Perón and Fidel Castro are on both lists. All three transformed their own societies and Perón and Castro both had influence beyond their own countries. We also include Lázaro Cárdenas, who is ranked 23 on the Latin American content analysis, and Raúl Haya de la Torre, who is ranked 43 on the content analysis. Cárdenas was the effective founder of the One-Party Dominance corporatist regime that dominated Mexico for two generations and shepherded both the strengthening of the state and the transformation to neoliberalism. We have no disagreement with the historians about Cárdenas, but they did not give

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him quite as much attention as we believe he deserved. This may be because the historians emphasized the collective nature of politics at that time. Haya de la Torre’s contribution to Peruvian politics was his party APRA, which challenged the oligarchic elite and brought new social movements and groups into the political fold. Although denied election to the presidency on several occasions, his influence was sufficient that it obliged the political elite to respond to emerging social and economic changes. Between the 1930s and 1980s Haya de la Torre’s APRA became the principal vector of the Peruvian political system. In Venezuela Juan Gómez oversaw the boom in oil production and employed it for patronage purposes, setting in place the same mechanisms which all Venezuelan governments have largely adopted down to the present. Salvador Allende is sadly missing from our list of transformational leaders because of the failure of his democratic socialist project. He went into history as a martyr, not as a transformational president. This makes him important for historical accounts, of course, and his political failure is instructive. The conditions were simply not present for a transformation to the kind of socialist regime his most militant supporters insisted upon demanding. To be a successful president, Allende would have had to accept an articulative or consolidating role building on the regime changes that were started in the Eduardo Frei government, much as Lula da Silva continued Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s project. He would not have been able to bring all of the Popular Unity coalition along with him on this approach; many would have denounced him as selling out the revolution. But he could have formed alliances with the Christian Democrats and other centrist parties who commanded the loyalty of roughly a third of the population. This is what the Concertación did after democracy was restored in 1990. One could argue that Fidel Castro was also a failed leader, although never a martyr. His attempts to lead revolutionary socialist movements throughout Latin America did fail. But he succeeded in transforming his own society for a very long historical period, vastly strengthening the state and delaying its entry into the world of neoliberal globalization. There would not have been a Cuban Revolution without his personal leadership (Goertzel 1992). ERA OF NEOLIBERAL GLOBALIZATION AND AFTER In the neoliberal period both we and the history books list Ronald Reagan as the only transformational US president. Given the US historical predisposition towards the market, his advocacy of neoliberal change during the 1980s was not as stark as it was in the more state-oriented Latin American region. Reagan’s transformational role is actually clearer in the domain of foreign policy. Although he was not involved in an existential conflict of the kind

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that Lincoln or FDR faced (the Civil War and World War II), the Cold War had been a defining feature of the international system for nearly four decades by the time he entered presidential office. Reagan’s two terms in office coincided with a shift in US foreign policy, away from the détente of the 1960s and 1970s and towards confrontation. Confrontation included increased military spending which Reagan advocates claim forced the Soviet Union into an unwinnable arms race and its eventual collapse. However, there is no mono-causal explanation regarding the end of the Cold War. A variety of explanations have been put forward to explain Soviet decline prior to 1989–1991 and which do not necessarily include US agency. This is where Reagan’s other importance—the cultural—is perhaps more relevant. Arguably no other political leader captured the zeitgeist of the 1980s or its manifestation in the Moral Majority better than Reagan. His appeal therefore made it possible for the pursuit of more economic liberalization and Cold War confrontation to take place at home and abroad. It is within this context that Reagan’s successors have operated, mostly in his shadow, whether as supporters or critics by Republican and Democratic presidents, respectively. Since Reagan’s presidency, historians have also devoted significant space to William Clinton and George W. Bush, but this is only because they wanted to give more coverage to recent history. Similarly, it is much too soon to judge Barack Obama’s presidency in terms of regime transformation and whether it has challenged the Reaganite model, which neither Clinton nor Bush appear to have done. In addition, because of his recent status as president, most of our history books consulted have not covered the Obama era. This will change as his presidency recedes into history and more analysis is done of his actions and policies while in office. We and the historians both list Augusto Pinochet and Hugo Chávez. They are, of course, ideological opposites and people who admire one are almost certain to hate the other. We don’t actually admire either, but we are not listing “great” presidents but transformational ones. It would be hard to deny that both brought about transformational regime changes in their countries. Both also had significant impact on the rest of Latin America. Pinochet’s regime was the first in Latin America to introduce and institutionalize neoliberal economic policies, a version of which have been followed by Concertación governments since. Chilean neoliberalism was also a model the rest of the region followed in the 1980s and 1990s. By contrast, Chávez drew his support from those who had been weakened by neoliberal reform; his election in 1998 made him the first of the growing number of leftists and state developmentalist presidents who began to emerge across the region during the 2000s. In addition, Chávez not only brought a previous regime—the Punto Fijo system—to an end, he oversaw the creation of a new one. Moreover, notwithstanding the current conflict tension and conflict be-

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tween Chavistas and their opponents, the emergence of Chávez’s constituency among the poor has become more solid; any future government will have to engage with it and its demands. Chávez’s entry onto the political scene and the establishment and consolidation of the Chavista regime brought the contemporary poor and marginalized into the polity at an earlier stage than several of the leftist presidents who followed him in Latin America during the 2000s. Whereas Lula in Brazil, the Kirchners in Argentina and the Concertación governments in Chile have all focused on redistribution, they have done so in the shadow of earlier change: both Lula and the Concertación governments accepted the previously established neoliberal models imposed by their predecessors, while it may be argued that the Kirchners were beneficiaries of the social and economic crisis that occurred in Argentina in 2001–2002. Although the Kirchners responded to social demands and introduced more redistributive welfare policies, they also weakened the influence of social movements at the expense of the state. The effect of this may have been to make the (re)turn to neoliberalism easier under the Macri presidency after 2015. Chávez provided electoral inspiration to Manuel López Obrador in Mexico, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Ollanta Humala in Peru, Evo Morales in Bolivia, even the second coming of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. But because Chávez was the first to capture the public mood and harness it, we have chosen to consider him—and not his comrades in other countries—as transformational. He is unique in the extent to which he has become a regional as well as a national leader, a role which was also played by Haya de la Torre. Indeed, Chávez’s influence persists from beyond the grave: as Venezuela sinks into political, social and economic crisis, the leadership has increasingly resorted to promoting the image of Chávez to bolster their support and unify fractures within the governing parties and its supporters in the social movements. A leader we admire is Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who is ranked only 35th in the content analysis of history books. We believe the historians underestimated his importance in their enthusiasm for the Lula da Silva government that came after Cardoso’s. Despite being an intellectual, Cardoso’s primary accomplishment was as a pragmatic leader and pragmatists are less exciting than utopians or ideologues. His first achievement was to stabilize financially chaotic Brazil in the mid-1990s. He persuaded the Congress to implement important administrative and fiscal reforms that enabled his inflation package to last and become an established expectation of Brazilian political culture. This was confirmed when Lula da Silva continued essentially the same macro-economic policies, at least until 2008, despite partisan and ideological differences. Cardoso also dealt in a pragmatic way with Brazil’s corruption problem by professionalizing the federal police so they could effectively pursue corrupt officials. And he began important social programs

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such as the bolsa escola (school grant), the forerunner of the broader bolsa familia (family grant) that became the signature accomplishment of the Lula da Silva government. The historians give a great deal of space to Lula da Silva, which reflects the excitement which he and the Workers Party were generating at the time the books were written. Lula’s success came from continuing and articulating the core of Cardoso’s structural changes together with a good bit of inspiring rhetoric. He had the sense to realize that Brazil did not need, and could not handle, a radical regime change at the end of the Cardoso administration, although he never publicly admitted as much. As it turned out, he did not handle the succession well, turning power over to Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, who lacked the needed political skills. At the time this is written, 2016, Rousseff has been impeached, Lula is being investigated for corruption, and Brazil has gone into a severe depression which is being blamed on the Workers Party’s fiscal irresponsibility during Rousseff’s second term. We suspect that future histories will have a more balanced account of the role of Lula da Silva. Other Latin American leaders of the era of neoliberal globalization who have not made our short list include Carlos Salinas, Ernesto Zedillo and Vicente Fox in Mexico, Carlos Menem in Argentina, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru. Why did we not rate them as transformational? The short answer is that they presided over periods of uncertainty which was generated as a result of their political innovations. As the last two PRI presidents during the 1990s, Salinas and Zedillo presided over the decline and collapse of the Mexican one-party system. Meanwhile Fox’s greatest achievement was simply being elected and occupying the presidency; in short, his importance was symbolic, that single-party PRI rule had come to an end. Menem’s rise challenged the orthodoxy in Peronismo, but the seeds of the Argentina financial crisis were to be found in the fixed exchange rate he introduced for the peso and which began to unravel after 1999. Similarly, Fujimori built what looked like a solid political order after 1990, but this proved transitory and collapsed after he fled the country. It is too soon to judge Mauricio Macri’s success in his aspiration to definitively transform Argentina away from Peronism. Other important leaders who did not quite make the cut as transformational presidents, in our judgment, include Lyndon Baines Johnson in the United States, Humberto Castelo Branco in Brazil, Alfonso López and Jorge Eliécer Gaitán in Colombia, Rómulo Betancourt in Venezuela, and Juan Velasco in Peru. Although Johnson expanded the New Deal coalition and consensus through his Great Society and civil rights reforms in the 1960s, his intervention into Vietnam proved divisive and polarizing across the United States. The consequences of this would be felt in a general malaise of the 1970s, leading to political crisis under Richard Nixon and economic difficulties under Jimmy Carter. Following the 1964 coup in Brazil, its leader, Humberto

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Castelo Branco, maintained the developmental state model initiated under earlier presidents, as did Juan Velasco in Peru. Neither was able to translate military rule into popular rule though, which would eventually weaken their regimes’ capacity for survival. Both López and Gaitán sought to expand the Liberal coalition, but López was unable to control it while Gaitán was assassinated before being able to see through his objectives. Our list of transformational leaders is probably too small rather than too large. Some historical regimes relied more on collective leadership, so the role of a single leader is less pronounced. The Brazilian military regime, for example, lasted longer than the Chilean one, but the former was not so much the product of a single individual. Nor did it transform the economic regime in the lasting way that the Chilean one did. No single president was responsible for the transition to democracy in Mexico. A longer list of transformational leaders might include all of those in table 3.1. That table also includes some whose contribution was largely negative, not transforming things so much as failing to do so in important ways, e.g., Bolívar and Santa Anna. We expect that many will disagree with some of our decisions, and we welcome discussion and controversy and feedback. This would certainly be an interesting topic for discussion in classes on Latin American political history where it has received much less attention than it has in the United States. ADDING TO OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LEADERSHIP Identifying transformational presidents is an interesting exercise beyond the list of names it produces. It prompts deliberation about what constitutes transformative and other forms of leadership as well as the roles that presidents might play which makes them effective or not. We have been guided by the concepts of transformational and transactional leadership, of reconstructive, articulative, preemptive, and disjunctive presidents, as suggested by Burns (1978) and Skowornek (1993, 2009, 2011). But these are not the only accounts of presidential leadership that are observable. As the examples of individual leaders across the different historical eras has shown, presidents can occupy a wide range of roles, and sometimes more than one. Drawing on the historical materials we have reviewed and concepts developed by other writers, it is possible to see parallels in our findings that are relevant to leadership elsewhere. We noted in the Introduction the importance of Weber’s (1919) typology of leadership from charismatic to rational (or legal) and traditional and the contribution it has made to understanding political change. Leaders like Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Perón, Vargas and Chávez have shared the attribute of charisma. Rational (or law-oriented) leaders like Truman, LBJ and

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successive Mexican and Peruvian presidents after Cárdenas and Castilla then followed, along with tradition-inclined leaders. The system stayed in place until its internal dynamics begin to weaken and contradict each other, setting in place scope for a new charismatic leaders to emerge. Michael Mumford (2006) has suggested that pragmatic may be a better term for many of these leaders who could be labelled rational-legal or traditional, or who Burns would classify as transactional. They do conduct a lot of transactions, but they do so with a primary focus on solving practical problems. They aren’t just administrators, keeping the wheels of government moving smoothly, although that is also valuable. Pragmatists echo some of the features of the rational leaders suggested by Weber. Furthermore, they can be contrasted to ideological leaders who apply a defined set of beliefs that are said to provide the solution to the country’s problems. Sometimes these beliefs are utopian, offering an idealized vision of the future (Bloch 1986, Chávez 2015). Notable examples of this include both transformational leaders like Jefferson, Reagan and Chávez, but also failed ones like Allende, Che Guevara and Goulart. These concepts are quite useful in the Latin American context, although we do not use them in exactly the way that Mumford and his colleagues do in their social psychological studies. None of these typologies zero in on leaders whose focus is on winning power, and who do so with clever and devious schemes. Plenty of presidents in the United States and Latin America could claim the mantle, from Jackson and Polk to Porfirio Díaz, Juan Gómez and Fujimori. This type is generally known as Machiavellian (Machiavelli [1513] 1995, Almeida 2013). Machiavelli described only the one type, but Isaiah Berlin’s (1953) famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox described the opposite to the Machiavellian. The fox is a Machiavellian animal while the hedgehog, at least in Berlin’s metaphor, just keeps plugging along doing one thing; Jimmy Carter and Fernando Belaúnde Terry spring to mind. Javier Santiso (2005, 134–44) added a third animal to Berlin’s zoological metaphor, the chameleon, to describe Latin American leaders who were adept at changing their colors. Perhaps the most notable of these was Vargas, who switched roles from dictator to populist democrat. But the concept might also be applied to Theodore Roosevelt in the United States, for being both a passionate imperialist and a progressive. Isaiah Berlin was surprised by how seriously his fable of the fox and the hedgehog was taken. He didn’t mean it as a scientific construct. But, as Berlin observed, “every classification throws light on something” (Jahanbegloo 2000, 188). These concepts describe roles that presidents can play, and some presidents are able to play more than one role. Some play one role at one time, then another at a later time, as circumstances change. Some roles seem deeply rooted in a president’s personality. Charisma seems to be a fixed personality trait; some leaders just don’t have much charisma no matter how much

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they would like to. Other roles can be learned. One can learn to be a pragmatic leader by taking courses in public administration and learning tools to fix problems. Reyes in Colombia achieved this by reaching beyond party divisions in nineteenth-century Colombia; in the twentieth century a number of later PRI presidents, including Echeverría, López Portillo, de la Madrid, Salinas and Zedillo, could also be included amongst them. Other roles may be forced on a president by his place in the historical cycle of a political regime. If a transformational president has started a successful new regime, the only choices available to his or her successors may be to consolidate it or to resist it—as Sarmiento in Argentina and Truman and LBJ in the United States successfully did and Balmaceda in Chile and Goulart in Brazil failed to do. Our typology of presidential leadership roles, in table 8.2, relies on the theorists we have discussed, both in this and earlier chapters, but we have suggested replacing some of the terms with ones that make more intuitive sense. We subdivide the transformational (or reconstructive) type into three varieties, based on the method the leader uses to try to be transformational: ideological, utopian, or charismatic. We also do not assume that a transformational leader was successful, only that he or she was trying to bring about a transformation. The resisting type combines Skowronek’s preemptive and disjunctive types. Beyond the individual traits of leaders, our comparative historical material also helps us to address other important questions about political leadership and the structure of government. The comparison of the United States and Latin America shows that adopting the constitutional forms of republicanism is not as important as how these forms are implemented by the leadership group. The American founding fathers had many ideological differences that might have torn the country apart, but their commitment to working together within the constraints of the constitutional system was strong enough to overcome most of them. But this constraint was not enough to resolve the fundamental structural issue of slavery, an issue that was resolved peacefully, if slowly, in Brazil. Perhaps national culture is more responsible for this difference than constitutional forms, but the surprising success of Pedro II’s lackadaisical leadership style should not be underestimated. Latin Americans, both on the right and the left, often viewed constitutional restraints as superficial and unimportant. Confronting difficult problems and strong ideological differences, they looked for a strongman—or a strong revolutionary party—to impose the will of their side and repress their opponents. In the aftermath of the wars of independence, however, there were often too many competing strongmen and personal armies for any of them to hold power for long. Later on, with the strengthening of national bureaucracies, infrastructure and armed forces, strongly authoritarian national regimes

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Table 8.2. A Typology of Leadership Roles Used by Presidents Transformational (Reconstructive)

Mobilizes people to bring about major change in the political regime, often using ideological, utopian and charismatic tools. Ideological

Presents a vision of the future based on a philosophy or doctrine. The leader may create a new doctrine or adopt an existing one.

Utopian

Presents an idealized image of the future, expressed in slogans and catch phrases.

Charismatic

Presents a vision of a future guided by the personal magnetism of the leader.

Consolidating (Articulative)

Builds on and institutionalizes the vision of a preceding transformational leader.

Resisting

Resists change. Preemptive

Works to block the actions of a developing political regime.

Disjunctive

Seeks to prolong the existence of a declining political regime.

Pragmatic

Focuses on finding specific solutions to short-term practical problems.

Administrative (Transactional)

Keeps the government working as smoothly as possible, encouraging productive collaborative work.

Preparatory

Lays the foundation for future changes not yet practical.

Machiavellian

Wins power with clever scheming and deception.

Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

were established in many countries. These were strong at first, and brought about some real changes, but they proved unable to meet the needs of the more complex societies engendered by their social and economic successes. As it turned out, the authoritarian regimes were no more stable or longlasting than the democratic ones, flawed as many of those were. It was only at the end of the twentieth century, with the end of the military regimes in the Southern Cone, the opening up of the party system in Mexico, the collapse of the Fujimorato in Peru, the end of the National Front in Colombia, and similar developments elsewhere, that a general consensus about the importance of sticking to democratic electoral rules has become well established in Latin America.

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As a leader of the independence struggle, Bolívar was unparalleled. And he may have been right that a king or an emperor who was widely accepted as legitimate could have held his country together during the early days of independence. But his efforts to become such a figure failed, as did Augustín de Iturbide’s in Mexico. It seems that an emperor cannot be created by fiat; he needs to have traditional legitimacy as in the Brazilian case. Men who have become de facto emperors, such as Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Porfirio Díaz in Mexico, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru, have not proved able to sustain their position for more than a generation or to pass their position on to a new generation. By contrast, in the United States the monarchical option was only ever considered for Washington, an honor which he declined. Following his departure from the political scene, it was never examined again. Leaders who were devoted to building democracy, especially in earlier periods, such as Benito Juárez in Mexico, Nilo Peçanha in Brazil, Domingo Sarmiento in Argentina, and Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, often found that they lacked the power to enact the reforms their countries needed. Haya de la Torre was denied the presidency, despite being arguably the most important single political figure in Peruvian history. Presidents who diverged from democratic norms, such as Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Perón in Argentina, may have been able to institute significant changes, but they found themselves floundering in more democratic and politically polarized settings, respectively. More recently, both Rafael Caldera and Carlos Andrés Pérez in Venezuela were relatively successful presidents during good economic times and poor ones unable to turn back the clock when the economy went south. By contrast, Hugo Chávez exploited the crisis to great effect. Despite attempting to seize power militarily in 1992, he eventually gained power as a democratically elected president in 1998, 2006, and 2012 and might have continued indefinitely had he not died prematurely in 2013. Our comparative study confirms the accepted notion that no one role or theory of leadership is sufficient; that their commitment or otherwise to the institutional arrangements in which they operate is no clear indicator of success; and that there is no linear progression from one type of leadership to another. Having dispensed with the “great man” theory, early sociological analyses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sought to explain leadership as “types.” Prominent among these was Max Weber, who postulated an inherent progression, from the charisma of individual leaders to traditional and eventually rational or bureaucratic leadership. Yet, although there is certainly a development (and expansion) of political institutions and especially the state, the succession of leadership types seems to be more cyclical than progressive. Charismatic individuals have been instrumental in innovating and institutionalizing new forms of state at different periods of development, for example Washington and FDR in the United States, Perón in Argentina, and

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Chávez in Venezuela. Traditional forms of patronage have been used by leaders towards their supporters in the present era, as with the Punto Fijo system of clientelism in Venezuela or Lula da Silva’s more recent use of the bolsa familia to shore up support among the poor in Brazil. The development of bureaucratic, rational-legal institutions did not wait until traditional and charismatic leadership was finished, but began quite early in the history of the Americas. Much of the national consolidation involved presidents establishing new political regimes. While some of these were highly reliant on the figure of the president, others became less dependent on individuals. In Chile, for example, the 1822 constitution persisted, even as the influence of Diego Portales declined. So too did early US presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson) lay out the procedures for how the presidency would function in the wider political system, including relations with the legislature and political parties. But what about the institution of the presidency itself? What can be said about these different experiences which are pertinent, regardless of the individual who occupies the presidency or the time in which he or she governed? One is that there are clear differences in the character of the presidency as an office across the different historical periods, regardless of whether they are great or not. Earlier presidencies were smaller both in size and scope. This meant their reach into society was limited, being constrained to existing elites. By contrast later presidencies, especially from the state-building period on, were far larger in size (including staff and resources) as well as extent. It is only in this period that presidents were able to appeal to previously unrepresented and non-elite groups, such as workers and peasants. Another is that the historical expansion of the presidency and of the state has had little impact on the activism of incumbents. Presidents have been dynamic irrespective of whether they have direct access to financial or other resources or not. Indeed, the absence of them may encourage more imaginative use of alternative resources, including social networks and personal ties to gain support (as many caudillos did). Active presidents make the most of what they have, even if their ideological and rhetorical commitment is to limited government, a claim made regularly and especially by US presidents since 1789, including Jefferson, Jackson and Reagan. Presidents also face a choice in relation to democracy. We use “democracy” in its most expansive manner possible here, beyond a focus on elections. On one hand, democracy offered opportunities to expand their base of support and reconstitute the political regime, by including new or excluded groups into their constituency, such as workers, the indigenous, women and the poor. Choosing to reject such groups meant that presidents ended up on the side of conservative elites. The situation was especially acute in Latin America where traditional elites such as landlords sought to limit access to the state. But even the United States could not avoid this choice; the question

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of whether to accept democracy or not had existed since the start of the republic. Early presidents like Washington saw little place for it; Jefferson and Jackson had an opposite view and the issue of national expansion and consolidation raised questions about the role of slavery. Later, the rise of the Progressive movement emerged as a reaction against the rise of industry, corporations and trusts. Maintaining democracy therefore became a balancing act; it offered opportunities for individuals like Theodore Roosevelt to exploit. On the other hand, lasting political innovation following crisis may be more likely when democracy is not chosen. Consider the cases of Cárdenas, Vargas and Perón, the giants of Latin America in the last century, or Castilla and Portales in the century before. In all these cases the leader was not compromised by the democratic obligation to share power. This transformation of the political system, the creation of corporatist organization, and the expansion of the state in the social and economic spheres was made easier by the capacity to rule by decree. Similarly, in the United States successful leaders were those who exploited periods of crisis to acquire influence. Both Lincoln and FDR—the dominant figures of the two American centuries— centralized power in their person and their immediate circle during the Civil War and the Great Depression and Second World War, respectively. Ultimately though, the interplay between leaders and the wider context is key to identifying whether a president will be transformational or not. Those operating “outside” of their particular period of economic, political and social time are more likely to be identified as “great” or transformational leaders since their actions entail a break with the political status quo and the introduction of innovation. By contrast, those who are more associated within the political time and regime—who operate “inside”—are more likely to be considered transactional in their approach. Their main concern is with maintaining the existing political system. But the changes made by leaders who operate within the system, such as Fernando Henrique Cardoso, may prove more lasting. Relevant in explaining this may be group dynamics theory. Although developed by social psychologists, it offers insights that can be applied to the dynamics of political regimes (Goertzel 1992, 104–24). In the most widely known version (Tuckman 1965), groups are said to go through five stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. This typology, even with five stages, is much easier to remember than Skowronek’s and it fits regime cycles rather well. In the forming stage, the regime is dependent on a strong leader. Then it is important for the leader to withdraw to allow the group to get beyond dependency and grow as a group. This was the genius of George Washington. In the absence of the charismatic leader, the group fights over leadership and works out norms for resolving its differences. Getting beyond storming to norming is the task of articulative leader-

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ship and took many years in a number of the countries examined here. When the group reaches the performing stage, transactional leadership is good enough. The final stage, adjourning, was not part of Tuckman’s original theory, but had to be added because some groups have trouble with it. Of course, societies don’t adjourn as small groups do, but they do put aside old regimes to take on new ones. Not all presidents who try to be transformational, or who use transformational rhetoric, actually succeed. Presidents may aspire to make major changes, such as to construct a settled national identity, enhance the centralization of the state, and integrate emergent social, political and economic forces. Latin America is littered with the experience of would-be transformational presidents who have sought to change the political system and failed; Salvador Allende, Alberto Fujimori and Fernando Collor are notable in this regard. That unpredictability means that while we may be able to identify when a political system is in crisis, yet we cannot say whether an individual president will be successful in fulfilling a transformational role. Many are called to reconstruct their nations, but few are chosen to succeed. This is what distinguishes a Vargas or a Perón from an Allende or a Leguía. Even if a political system is in decline, it does not mean that it faces imminent collapse. Disjunctive presidents may be very resourceful in extending the life of a system that is past its prime, and it may take several attempts for a leader who is charismatic enough or an ideology that is persuasive enough to come along. The cases of Colombia and Mexico are illustrative. In Colombia the Liberal-Conservative dichotomy continued to dominate politics through long periods of discontent and assaults by violent revolutionary movements. This may be in part because the FARC and other revolutionary groups have lost faith in their own ideologies in the post-Soviet age, and seem more and more like holdovers from an earlier era. And in Mexico the PRI regime coasted along long after the myth of the revolution had lost its vitality. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and Andrés Manuel López Obrador were perhaps not charismatic enough to overcome the inertia of a regime that mobilized considerable technocratic resources to transform the economic system to the opposite of where it had come from. AREAS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH If the above observations have contributed to our understanding of leadership, they also raise some issues that merit further enquiry. One is teasing out the tension between institutions and individual agency. Institutions may range from the informal, such as conventions and modes of operation, to the

Conclusion: The Transformational Presidents of the Americas

229

more formal, including rules, regulations and the presence of organizations, both within the presidency as well as in the other branches of government. At one level, this suggests that the more established these are, arguably the greater the capacity for individual presidents to act. Their absence, by contrast, may make it harder for a president—even one keen to make a difference and affect change—to realize it. This is especially pertinent in periods of institutional uncertainty and political crisis. Yet at another level, this does not necessarily need to happen. Exceptional individuals may still overcome such a challenge, as the example of Lincoln during the Civil War may attest. Much of this may be attributed to the dynamism of individual leaders. Consequently, a question regarding the relationship between the structure of institutions and agency is relevant here: what are the circumstances which prompt leaders to overcome apparent limitations in the size and scope of their office? A second and related topic for further development is how the relationship between individual leaders and the structures within which they operate may change from one historical era to another. In chapter 3 we identified four broad historical eras (and particular social, economic and political configurations and elite actors), and within them shorter periods that we called “political regimes.” Whereas structural factors were arguably more prominent in the larger historical eras, individual efforts at agency seemed to operate within the regimes. Indeed, individual leaders may be associated with a particular regime of a couple of decades. But why is it that some individuals in political office are unable to transcend the wider spirit of the age while others are able to do so? We suggested some reasons for this, including previous work which has identified the importance of shared acceptance of a particular political system by political and social actors which aids stability against the pursuit for efficiency as a driver for change (Eckstein 1992). While we did not focus specifically on these dynamics, a broad historical perspective is invaluable when considering why some individuals and the innovative political regimes they constructed were successful (e.g., Washington, Vargas, Perón) while others were not (e.g., Pardo, Díaz). A third place for further study is the question of responsibility for the nature of a presidency. As we have suggested above, individual presidents have been identified as transformational or not. But to what extent is this the action of the named individual who occupies the presidential office? Or is it the result of another person or persons? Administrations are large operations, composed of dozens of individuals in a president’s immediate circle and extending to hundreds, even thousands, beyond it. The president cannot be directly responsible for all the actions of his or her government; indeed, some decisions may have been signed off by the president’s aides rather than himself or herself. Yet we still give such governments the label of the president’s name. The example of Jackson is useful in this regard: to what extent

230

Chapter 8

was the formation of a more democratic political party—and subsequent party system—the result of direct action undertaken by Jackson? Or was it due more to his associates, including Van Buren in the Northeast? In short, how do we attribute responsibility in the context of a collective endeavor like presidential rule? Fourth, it might be worth revisiting the criteria that we have used to identify transformational leadership. Are the three features of innovation during difficult times, new consensuses and institutionalization of change as important as we suggest? Are there others which have been missed? Would a broader reading of leadership lead to other forms of evaluation being as important or more important? For example, would parliamentarism attribute the same importance to innovation and lasting change as accounts of presidentialism appear to do? Would collegiality and collaboration with established institutions not be of greater significance for example? CONCLUSION In this chapter we have presented the transformational presidents and political leaders of the United States and Latin America since independence. We identified twenty individuals as transformational leaders and explained why we selected them. Our selections are closely correlated with the leaders ranked highest in a content analysis of history books, although there are some differences. This is partly a matter of definition; our list might have been closer to that derived from the content analysis if we had given more weight to failed transformational leaders. We selected the twenty leaders considering the circumstances in which they operated and their ability to transcend them by introducing innovative new policies, programs or orders which have successfully outlasted them. To do this, we had to undertake a brief review of the principal features associated with transformational leadership as well as noting those who did not make the list and the reasons why. We acknowledged that despite efforts to acquire criteria, the process of selecting transformational leaders in the Americas requires some degree of subjective evaluation or bias. We recognize such limitations, especially when much of the effort in the literature relating to US presidential leadership has sought to be more “objective” and measurable. Yet we do not see this as an impossible constraint. Throughout the book we have pointed out the apparent absence of any efforts to rank presidents across the region and over the whole time period we are concerned with. Therefore, we see ours as only the first contribution of what we hope will be an ongoing debate on the topic. In addition to identifying the transactional US and Latin American presidents, we identified some broader themes which the individual cases have

Conclusion: The Transformational Presidents of the Americas

231

revealed concerning presidential leadership. We have highlighted the importance of the state’s expanding role in opening up opportunities for new programs and bases of support to the interaction of individual presidential agency and the nature of the political, economic and social environment which affects their dynamism. We conclude with a call to arms. We have suggested those political leaders who we consider to have been transformative in the Americas. Some may agree with our list, others may not, and we hope that it will stimulate a debate, both scholarly and public. We invite debate, not only on the names listed, but also on the methods used to reach them. Some may find our approach of comparative political history the means to achieve this; others may seek out alternative methods, including more statistical methods (if such data can be found that reaches back to 1800). Yet only by considering the means as well as the ends can we contribute further to exploring what makes certain presidents and political leaders in the Americas transformational or not—and in so doing, contribute to the broader understanding of political leadership more generally.

Appendix A

Complete List of Number of Pages on which Political Leaders Are Cited in Histories of Latin America Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identity

Bolívar, Simón

18.75

22

18

23

12

Liberator and Various President

Castro, Fidel

18.75

18

35

15

7

President of Cuba

Chávez, Hugo

14.75

27

17

3

12

President of Venezuela

Díaz, Porfirio

12.25

10

18

11

10

President of Mexico

Vargas, Getúlio

10.5

11

17

3

11

President of Brazil

Allende, Salvador

9.5

8

14

6

10

President of Chile

Perón, Juan

9.5

6

18

2

12

President of Argentina

Pinochet, Augusto

8.5

10

12

3

9

President of Chile

Silva, Lula

8

21

3

2

6

President of Brazil

Zapata, Emiliano

8

5

10

8

9

Mexican Revolutionary

Guevara, Che

7.25

10

13

5

1

Cuban Revolutionary

Batista, Fulgencio

6.5

4

8

8

6

President of Cuba

Pedro II

6.25

12

4

7

2

Emperor of Brazil

Rosas, Juan Manuel

6.25

9

10

2

4

President of Argentina

Villa, Pancho

6.25

6

6

7

6

President of Mexico

Obregon, Alvaro

6

2

10

7

5

President of Mexico

233

Appendix A

234 Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identity

Goulart, João

5.75

5

10

0

8

President of Brazil

Sarmiento, Domingo

5.75

2

12

5

4

President of Argentina

Fujimori, Alberto

5.5

6

5

2

9

President of Peru

San Martín, José

5.5

5

5

7

5

Protector of Peru

Martí, José

5.5

3

8

6

5

Cuban Revolutionary

Frei Montalva, Eduardo

5.25

8

7

2

4

President of Chile

Cárdenas, Lázaro

5.25

6

2

5

8

President of Mexico

Madero, Francisco

5.25

3

7

4

7

President of Mexico

Carranza, Venustiano

5.25

2

7

6

6

President of Mexico

Morales, Evo

4.75

8

7

0

4

President of Bolivia

Pedro I

4.75

5

5

7

2

Emperor of Brazil

Vasconcelos, José

4.75

4

7

6

2

Mexican Educator

Hidalgo, Miguel

4.25

4

6

3

4

President of Mexico

Santa Anna, Antonio

4

3

7

4

2

President of Mexico

Yrigoyen, Hipólito

4

3

8

0

5

President of Argentina

Perón, Evita

3.75

5

6

2

2

First Lady of Argentina

Calles, Plutarco

3.75

1

8

3

3

President of Mexico

Páez, José Antonio

3.5

5

3

3

3

President of Venezuela

Cardoso, Fernando 3.25 H.

10

1

0

2

President of Brazil

Salinas, Carlos

3.25

4

7

0

2

President of Mexico

Kubitschek, Juscelino

3.25

4

3

4

2

President of Brazil

Somoza, Anastasio 3.25

2

2

5

4

President of Nicaragua

Alessandri, Arturo

3

7

5

0

0

President of Chile

Uribe, Alvaro

3

6

2

2

2

President of Colombia

Núñez, Rafael

3

6

0

0

6

President of Colombia

Árbenez, Jacobo

3

5

4

0

3

President of Guatemala

Appendix A Name of Leader

Mean

235

1

2

3

4

Identity

Haya de la Torre, V. 3

4

5

0

3

Peruvian Party Leader

Sucre, Antonio

3

4

2

3

3

President of Bolivia and Peru

Perez Jiménez, M.

3

3

0

0

9

President of Venezuela

Juarez, Benito

3

2

5

3

2

President of Mexico

Mariátegui, José

3

2

5

4

1

Peruvian Activist

Iturbide, Augustine

3

1

5

3

3

Emperor of Mexico

O’Higgins, Bernardo

3

1

4

5

2

Supreme Director of Chile

Francia, José Gaspar

3

0

5

4

3

Consul of Paraguay

Trujillo, Rafael

2.75

3

1

4

3

President of Dominican Republic

Walker, William

2.75

3

0

5

3

President of Nicaragua

Gómez, Juan

2.75

3

1

0

7

President of Venezuela

Portales, Diego

2.75

3

6

1

1

Chilean Statesman

Huerta, Victoriano

2.75

2

3

4

2

President of Mexico

Velasco, Juan

2.75

2

3

0

6

President of Peru

Miranda, Francisco

2.75

1

4

4

2

Venezuelan Supreme Chief

Alessandri, Jorge

2.5

4

5

1

0

President of Chile

Ibáñez del Campo, C.

2.25

4

3

0

2

President of Chile

Menem, Carlos

2.25

4

2

0

3

President of Argentina

Chamorro, Violeta

2.25

3

3

0

3

President of Nicaragua

Gaitán, Jorge

2

7

1

0

0

Colombian Party Leader

Castro, Raul

2

4

3

0

1

President of Cuba

Zedillo, Ernesto

2

4

2

0

2

President of Mexico

Betancourt, Rómulo 2

4

1

0

3

President of Venezuela

Bachelet, Michele

2

3

0

0

5

President of Chile

García, Alan

2

2

6

0

0

President of Peru

Appendix A

236 Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identity

Salgado, Plínio

2

2

6

0

0

Brazilian Party Leader

Sandino, Augusto

2

2

1

4

1

Nicaraguan Revolutionary

Santander, Francisco

2

1

1

2

4

President of New Granada

Belaúnde, Fernando

1.75

4

3

0

0

President of Peru

Castro, Cipriano

1.75

4

0

0

3

President of Venezuela

Alfonsín, Raúl

1.75

3

4

0

0

President of Argentina

Fernández, Cristina 1.75

3

2

0

2

President of Argentina

Quadros, Janio

1.75

3

4

0

0

President of Brazil

Zelaya, José

1.75

3

1

0

3

President of Nicaragua

Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc

1.75

3

2

1

1

Mexican Party Leader

Balmaceda, José

1.75

3

0

0

4

President of Chile

Correa, Rafael

1.75

2

2

0

3

President of Ecuador

Urquiza, Justo José 1.75

2

2

0

3

President of Argentina

Castelo Branco, H.

1.75

2

1

0

4

President of Brazil

Ortega, Daniel

1.5

3

2

0

1

President of Nicaragua

Caldera, Rafael

1.5

3

1

0

2

President of Venezuela

D'Aubisson, Roberto

1.5

1

0

0

5

Salvadorian Politician

Dutra, Eurico

1.5

1

4

0

1

President of Brazil

Mitre, Bartolomé

1.5

1

4

0

1

President of Argentina

Andrada, José B.

1.5

1

3

0

2

Secretary of State of Brazil

Aylwin, Patricio

1.5

1

3

0

2

President of Chile

Sarney, José

1.5

1

4

0

1

President of Brazil

Guerrero, Vicente

1.5

0

3

0

3

President of Mexico

López Portillo, José 1.5

0

4

0

2

President of Mexico

Appendix A

237

Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identity

Rouseff, Dilma

1.25

5

0

0

0

President of Brazil

Arias Sanchez, Oscar

1.25

3

1

1

0

President of Costa Rica

Fox, Vicente

1.25

3

1

0

1

President of Mexico

Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo

1.25

3

0

0

2

President of Colombia

Paz Estenssoro, Victor

1.25

2

0

0

3

President of Bolivia

Duvalier, François

1.25

1

0

2

2

President of Haiti

Collor de Mello, F.

1.25

1

3

0

1

President of Brazil

Tomic, Radomiro

1.25

1

3

0

1

Chilean Party Leader

Morelos, José

1.25

0

1

3

1

Mexican Revolutionary

Rivadavia, Bernardino

1.25

0

3

0

2

President of Argentina

Santos, Juan Manuel

1

4

0

0

0

President of Colombia

Duarte, José

1

3

1

0

0

President of El Salvador

Gaviria, César

1

3

1

0

0

President of Colombia

Santos Zelaya, José

1

3

0

0

1

President of Nicaragua

Toledo, Alejandro

1

1

3

0

0

President of Peru

Reyes, Bernardo

1

0

3

0

1

Mexican General

Chinchilla, Laura

0.75

3

0

0

0

President of Costa Rica

de la Madrid, Miguel 0.75

3

0

0

0

President of Mexico

Serra, Jose

0.75

3

0

0

0

Brazilian Governor

Calderón Guardia, R.

0.75

0

0

3

0

President of Costa Rica

Dessalines, JeanJacque

0.75

0

0

3

0

Emperor of Haiti

Kuczynski, Pedro P. 0.75

0

3

0

0

Prime Minister of Peru

Prestes, Luís

0

3

0

0

Brazilian Communist

0.75

Appendix A

238 Name of Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

Identity

Quiroga, Facundo

0.75

0

3

0

0

Argentine Caudillo

Mean: Average number of pages on which the leader is cited in the four books. Books: 1: Skidmore, Smith, and Green, 2014 edition. 2: Williamson, 2009 edition. 3: Eakin, 2007 edition. 4: Keen and Haynes, 2004 edition. Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

Appendix B

Complete List of Number of Pages on which Political Leaders Are Cited in Histories of the United States Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.6

15

33

20

47

23

President

Lincoln, Abraham

23.2

19

24

11

46

16

President

Jefferson, Thomas

18

5

27

11

37

10

President

Jackson, Andrew

17.6

7

35

7

22

17

President

Washington, George

16.2

6

23

7

34

11

President

Bush, George W.

16

14

14

NA

29

7

President

Clinton, Bill

15.8

8

12

3

34

22

President

Reagan, Ronald

15.4

7

15

4

27

24

President

Truman, Harry

15.2

1

16

8

26

25

President

Roosevelt, Theodore

14.8

4

10

8

35

17

President

Nixon, Richard

13.2

2

11

7

22

24

President

Wilson, Woodrow

13.2

2

12

10

32

10

President

Madison, James

10.8

5

15

4

23

7

President

Eisenhower, Dwight

10.6

0

13

12

16

12

President

Bush, George H. W.

10.4

0

10

3

15

24

President

Kennedy, John F.

10

3

12

6

12

17

President

Clay, Henry

9.6

2

23

3

18

2

Senator

Adams, John

9.2

2

15

3

19

7

President

Grant, Ulysses

9.2

4

16

6

17

3

President, General

Johnson, Lyndon B.

9

1

8

5

13

18

President

239

Appendix B

240 Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Hamilton, Alexander

8.8

3

13

5

15

8

Founding Father

Carter, Jimmy

8.2

1

7

3

17

13

President

McKinley, William

8.2

0

8

3

20

10

President

Johnson, Andrew

7.6

3

15

4

14

2

President

Adams, John Q.

7.2

1

17

2

13

3

President

Van Buren, Martin

6.8

1

10

3

15

5

President

Morgan, J. P.

6.6

3

0

2

13

15

Financier

Calhoun, John C.

6.4

2

10

2

17

1

Secessionist Leader

King, Martin Luther

6

6

8

2

8

6

Civil Rights Leader

Franklin, Benjamin

5.8

2

9

1

12

5

Founding Father

Cleveland, Grover

5.6

3

6

0

12

7

President

Ford, Gerald

5.6

2

4

1

12

9

President

Hoover, Herbert

5.6

0

8

6

11

3

President

Lee, Robert E.

5.2

4

5

3

11

3

Confederate General

Monroe, James

5

2

7

2

7

7

President

Webster, Daniel

5

3

11

0

7

4

Senator

Douglas, Stephen

4.8

3

4

2

15

0

Presidential Candidate

MacArthur, Douglas

4.8

3

7

3

9

2

General

Polk, James Knox

4.8

0

6

3

9

6

President

Rockefeller, John D.

4.6

1

1

3

11

7

Business Magnate

Douglas, Frederick

4.4

2

0

0

8

12

Abolitionist

Carnegie, Andrew

4.2

0

2

0

9

10

Industrialist

Scott, Winfield

4.2

0

5

2

9

5

General and Presidential Candidate

Debs, Eugene

4

1

2

2

4

11

Socialist Labor Leader

Dubois, W. E. B.

4

1

2

0

3

14

Civil Rights Activist

Taylor, Zachary

4

0

7

1

5

7

President

Bryan, William Jennings

3.8

2

5

1

8

3

Presidential Candidate

Harrison, Benjamin

3.8

2

3

1

11

2

President

Harrison, William H.

3.8

3

6

3

5

2

President

Taft, William Howard

3.8

1

4

0

11

3

President

Adams, Samuel

3.4

0

3

2

7

5

Founding Father

Appendix B

241

Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Coolidge, Calvin

3.4

0

5

1

10

1

President

Harding, Warren

3.4

4

3

2

6

2

President

Hayes, Rutherford

3.4

2

4

1

7

3

President

Kissinger, Henry

3.4

0

0

1

2

14

Secretary of State

Stevens, Thaddeus

3.4

1

8

1

7

0

Congressional Leader

Gore, Albert

3.2

0

4

1

8

3

Vice President

Marshall, John

3.2

2

5

2

7

0

Supreme Court Justice

Brown, John

3

4

1

3

5

2

Abolitionist

Buchanan, James

3

2

3

1

9

0

President

Cheney, Richard

3

0

8

NA

3

1

Vice President

Davis, Jefferson

3

1

2

1

11

0

Confederate President

Henry, Patrick

3

1

2

2

7

3

Founding Father

Garrison, William Lloyd

2.8

3

2

0

3

6

Abolitionist

Lodge, Henry Cabot

2.8

1

1

2

3

7

Senator

Paine, Thomas

2.8

1

3

1

5

4

Founding Father

Burr, Aaron

2.6

2

2

3

6

0

Vice President

Frémont, John C.

2.6

1

2

1

8

1

Senator, Presidential Candidate

McClellan, George B.

2.6

1

3

0

9

0

Civil War General, Presidential Candidate

Garfield, James

2.4

1

6

1

4

0

President

Gompers, Samuel

2.4

0

1

1

2

8

Labor Leader

McCarthy, Joseph

2.4

2

3

2

3

2

Senator

Seward, William

2.2

2

4

0

5

0

Secretary of State

Sumner, Charles

2.2

2

3

0

6

0

Congressional Leader

Biddle, Nicholas

2

1

4

2

3

0

Financier

Kennedy, Robert

2

0

3

1

4

2

Attorney General

McNamara, Robert

2

0

0

1

5

4

Secretary of Defense

Rumsfeld, Donald

2

0

4

0

6

0

Secretary of Defense

Washington, Booker T.

2

1

0

0

6

3

African-American Leader

Appendix B

242 Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Arnold, Benedict

1.8

2

2

0

5

0

Revolutionary War Defector

Dewey, Thomas

1.8

0

4

2

3

0

Presidential Candidate

Fillmore, Millard

1.8

0

3

1

5

0

President

Goldman, Emma

1.8

0

0

1

0

8

Anarchist Leader

Gould, Jay

1.8

1

0

1

4

3

Industrialist

Humphrey, Hubert

1.8

1

2

1

2

3

Vice President

Marshall, George C.

1.8

0

5

0

2

2

Soldier and Statesman

Powell, Colin

1.8

0

3

0

4

2

General

Tyler, John C.

1.8

0

4

1

3

1

President

Wallace, Henry

1.8

0

3

0

4

2

Presidential Candidate

Brzezinski, Zbigniew

1.75

0

0

NA

1

6

National Security Advisor

Agnew, Spiro

1.6

0

4

0

2

2

Vice President

Chase, Salmon P.

1.6

0

2

0

6

0

Governor, Senator, Chief Justice

Heywood, Bill

1.6

0

0

0

0

8

Labor Leader

Knox, Henry

1.6

0

2

0

3

3

Secretary of War

LaFolette, Robert

1.6

1

4

0

2

1

Senator, Presidential Candidate

Lee, Richard Henry

1.6

0

3

1

3

1

Founding Father

Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr.

1.6

0

2

0

0

6

Senator

Patton, George S.

1.6

0

1

0

6

1

WW II General

Pershing, John J.

1.6

1

1

0

6

0

WW I General

Sherman, John

1.6

0

1

0

7

0

Senator and Secretary of State

Sinclair, Upton

1.6

0

2

0

4

2

Novelist and Political Candidate

Arthur, Chester

1.4

0

2

0

5

0

President

Blaine, James

1.4

0

7

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Ellsberg, Daniel

1.4

0

1

0

1

5

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower

Gingrich, Newt

1.4

0

5

1

1

0

Congressional Leader

Appendix B

243

Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Haldeman, H. R.

1.4

0

3

0

3

1

Presidential Advisor

Hutchinson, Thomas

1.4

0

2

0

1

4

Governor of Massachusetts Colony

Malcom X

1.4

2

0

0

2

3

Black Activist

O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip”

1.4

0

7

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Smith, Alfred

1.4

1

3

1

2

0

Presidential Candidate

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady

1.4

0

2

0

3

2

Suffragist

Stephens, Alexander

1.4

0

4

0

3

0

Confederate Leader

Taft, Robert A.

1.4

0

4

3

0

0

Congressional Leader

Turner, Nat

1.4

0

2

1

1

3

Slave Rebellion Leader

Vesey, Denmark

1.4

2

1

0

1

3

Slave Rebellion Leader

Dole, Robert

1.25

0

3

NA

1

1

Presidential Candidate

Addams, Jane

1.2

1

0

0

5

0

Social Worker

Crawford, William

1.2

0

0

0

6

0

Secretary of War and of Treasury

Farragut, David

1.2

0

2

1

3

0

Admiral

Gallatin, Albert

1.2

0

0

0

6

0

Senator, Ambassador

Grimké, Angelina

1.2

1

0

0

3

2

Abolitionist

Hopkins, Harry

1.2

0

1

1

3

1

Presidential Advisor

Hughes, Langston

1.2

0

1

0

0

5

African American Activist and Poet

Kennedy, Edward

1.2

0

2

0

3

1

Senator

King, Rufus

1.2

0

0

0

6

0

Senator, Diplomat

LaGuardia, Fiorello

1.2

0

2

0

0

4

Mayor of New York

Mahan, Alfred Thayer

1.2

0

0

0

4

2

Admiral

Marshall, Thurgood

1.2

0

1

0

2

3

Civil Rights Lawyer

Randolph, John

1.2

0

5

1

0

0

Congressional Leader

Root, Elihu

1.2

0

0

0

2

4

Secretary of War

Appendix B

244 Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Rove, Karl

1.2

0

4

0

2

0

Campaign Advisor

Sanger, Margaret

1.2

1

0

0

4

1

Birth Control Activist

Stanton, Edwin

1.2

0

3

0

3

0

Secretary of War

Starr, Kenneth

1.2

0

2

0

4

0

Solicitor General

Stuart, Jeb

1.2

1

0

0

5

0

Confederate General

Taney, Roger B.

1.2

0

1

0

5

0

Supreme Court Justice

Truth, Sojourner

1.2

0

0

0

1

5

Abolitionist

Vanderbilt, Cornelius

1.2

1

0

0

4

1

Business Magnate

Wallace, George

1.2

2

3

0

1

0

Governor

Allen, Ethan

1

0

0

0

4

1

Revolutionary Leader

Berkman, Alexander

1

0

0

0

0

5

Anarchist Leader

Calley, William

1

0

1

0

1

3

Soldier, War Criminal

Frick, Henry

1

0

0

0

2

3

Industrialist

Grimké, Sarah

1

0

0

0

3

2

Abolitionist

Hancock, John

1

0

1

0

3

1

Founding Father

Hiss, Alger

1

0

3

0

2

0

Government Official Accused of Spying

Hoover, J. Edgar

1

1

0

0

4

0

FBI Director

Johnston, Joseph

1

0

3

0

2

0

Confederate General

Kennan, George

1

0

0

0

3

2

Diplomat

Kleindienst, Richard

1

0

1

0

1

3

Attorney General

Livingston, Robert F.

1

0

4

0

1

0

Founding Father

Lloyd, Henry Demarest

1

0

1

0

1

3

Progressive Activist

North, Oliver

1

0

2

0

0

3

National Security Advisor

Pierce, Franklin

1

1

0

1

3

0

President

Randolph, Edmond

1

0

4

0

0

1

Attorney General

Rockefeller, David

1

0

0

0

1

4

Banker

Stevenson, Adlai

1

0

2

3

0

0

Presidential Candidate

Tilden, Samuel

1

0

3

0

2

0

Presidential Candidate

Appendix B

245

Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Tubman, Harriet

1

0

1

0

1

3

Abolitionist

Weaver, James B.

1

1

0

0

3

1

Presidential Candidate

Creel, George

0.8

0

0

0

1

3

Propagandist

Dickinson, John

0.8

0

3

0

1

0

Founding Father

Ettor, Joseph

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Labor Activist

George, Henry

0.8

1

0

0

0

3

Tax Activist

Greeley, Horace

0.8

0

1

0

0

3

Editor and Congressman

Hitchcock, Ethan Allen

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Civil War General

Hughes, Charles Evans

0.8

0

1

0

3

0

Supreme Court Justice

Jones, Mary Harris

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Labor Organizer

Kovic, Ron

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Antiwar Activist

Lincoln, Mary Todd

0.8

0

1

0

3

0

First Lady

McAdoo, William Gibbs

0.8

0

1

0

3

0

Secretary of the Treasury

Meade, George Gordon

0.8

0

0

0

4

0

Civil War General

O’Sullivan, John L.

0.8

0

3

0

0

1

Columnist and Editor

Parsons, Albert

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Socialist Leader

Phillips, Wendell

0.8

0

0

0

1

3

Abolitionist

Pinckney, Charles C.

0.8

0

1

0

3

0

General, Presidential Candidate

Roosevelt, Eleanor

0.8

0

0

0

3

1

First Lady

Rusk, Dean

0.8

0

0

0

0

4

Secretary of State

Schwartzkopf, Norman

0.8

0

1

0

3

0

General in Gulf War

Sherman, Roger

0.8

0

4

0

0

0

Founding Father

Warren, Earl

0.8

0

4

0

0

0

Supreme Court Justice

Weinberger, Caspar

0.8

0

1

0

0

3

Secretary of Defense

Weyerhauser, Frank

0.8

0

0

0

4

0

Busines Magnate

Adams, Charles F.

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

State Senator

Beauregard, P. G. T.

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Southern Military Officer

Berrigan, Daniel

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Peace Activist

Appendix B

246 Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Berrigan, Philip

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Peace Activist

Brecher, Jeremy

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Labor Activist

Cannon, Joe

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Congressional Leader

Colfax, Schuyler

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Connery, William P.

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Congressional Leader

DeLay, Tom

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Deloria, Vine

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Native American Writer

Dewey, George

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Admiral

Dorr, Thomas

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Extra-legal Governor

Dulles, John Foster

0.6

0

0

3

0

0

Secretary of State

Flexner, Eleanor

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Feminist Writer

Foster, Vincent

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

White House Counsel

Foster, William Z.

0.6

0

2

0

0

1

Communist Leader

House, Edward

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Presidential Advisor

Howard, Oliver O.

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Civil War General

Hubbel, Webster

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Presidential Advisor

Hudson, Hosea

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

African American Labor Activist

Hyde, Henry

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Johnston, Albert Sidney

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

General

Mallory, Stephen

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Confederate Naval Secretary

Norris, George

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

O’Hare, Kate Richards

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Socialist Activist

Parker, Theodore

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Abolitionist Preacher

Pinchot, Gifford

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Forester, Governor

Randolph, A. Philip

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Civil Rights and Labor Leader

Appendix B

247

Leader

Mean

1

2

3

4

5

Identity

Rice, Condolezza

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Presidential Advisor

Russo, Anthony

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Pentagon Papers Whistleblower

Sitting Bull

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Tribal Chief

Thurmond, Strom

0.6

0

3

0

0

0

Congressional Leader

Trumbo, Dalton

0.6

0

0

0

0

3

Screenwriter

Walker, Robert J.

0.6

0

0

0

3

0

Secretary of the Treasury

Mean: Average number of pages on which the leader is cited in the five books. Books: 1: Jenkins 2012. 2: Remini 2009. 3: Sinclair 1999. 4: Schweikart and Allen 2004. 5: Zinn 2005. Note: Table created by Guy Burton and Ted Goertzel

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Index

Acción Democrática (AD). See Democratic Action Party (Venezuela) Acción Popular (AP). See Popular Action Party (Peru) Adams, Charles, 239 Adams, John, 24, 26, 48, 62, 68, 239 Adams, John Q., 26, 48, 239 Adams, Samuel, 239 Addams, Jane, 239 Agnew, Spiro, 239 Alemán Valdés, Miguel, 125 Alessandri, Arturo, 37, 150–151, 157, 233 Alessandri, Jorge, 37, 151, 158, 233 Alfonsín, Raúl, 37, 185–186, 233 Aliança Nacional Libertadora (ANL). See National Liberation Alliance (Brazil) Alianza coalition (Chile), 205 Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA). See American Popular Revolutionary Allen, Ethan, 239 Allende, Salvador, 20, 21, 37, 151, 152–154, 156, 159, 201, 203, 208, 211, 217, 222, 228, 233 Altamirano, Carlos, 153 Alvear, Marcelo, 132 Amado, Jorge, 114 American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Party (Peru), 140, 141–143, 156, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195, 217 Andrada, José Bonifácio, 37, 49, 63, 233

Andrés Pérez, Carlos, 149, 158, 196–197, 208, 225 Árbenez, Jacobo, 233 ARENA Party (Brazil), 119 Arias Sanchez, Oscar, 233 Arnold, Benedict, 239 Arthur, Chester, 239 Augustine of Hippo, 3 Avellaneda, Nicolás, 91 Ávila Camacho, Manuel, 125 Aylwin, Patricio, 37, 203, 233 Bachelet, Michelle, 14, 37, 204, 205–206, 233 Balmaceda, José Manuel, 37, 99, 223, 233 Balta, José, 94 Barco, Virgilio, 131, 181, 182 Barreiro, José María, 54 Batista, Fulgencio, 21, 233 Beauregard, P. G. T., 239 Belaúnde, Fernando, 37, 142–143, 190, 191, 222, 233 Bell, Alexander Graham, 76 Benavides, Óscar, 138, 142 Berkman, Alexander, 239 Berlin, Isaiah, 222 Bernardes, Artur, 79 Berrigan, Daniel, 239 Berrigan, Philip, 239 Betancur, Belisario, 131 Betancourt, Ingrid, 183

261

262

Index

Betancourt, Rómulo, 37, 146–147, 148, 149, 158, 220, 233 Biddle, Nicholas, 239 Billinghurst, Guillermo, 138, 141, 156 Blaine, James, 239 Bolívar, Simón, ix, x, xi, 10, 20, 21, 25, 37, 43, 46, 51, 53–55, 56, 59, 63, 64, 84, 85, 96, 97, 198, 199, 211, 214, 221, 225, 233 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon, 2 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 45, 49, 51, 53, 60 Borgoño, Justiniano, 137 Brás, Venceslau, 79 Brazilian Communist Party, 114 Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, 176 Brazilian Labor Party, 115 Brecher, Jeremy, 239 Brown, John, 239 Bryan, William Jennings, 108, 239 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 239 Buchanan, James, 239 Büchi, Hernán, 202 Burns, James MacGregor, xii, xiii, 4, 6, 212, 222 Burr, Aaron, 239 Bush, George H. W., 24, 26, 164, 239 Bush, George W., 1, 24, 26, 165–166, 167, 189, 199, 207, 211, 212, 214, 218, 239 Bustamente, Anastasio, 52 Bustamente y Rivero, José Luis, 142 Cáceres, Andrés Avelino, 37, 96, 136–137, 138, 156 Caldera, Rafael, 37, 148–149, 197, 208, 225, 233 Calderón, Felipe, 125, 179–180, 181 Calderón Guardia, R., 233 Calhoun, John, 239 Calles, Plutarco Elias, 37, 121, 123–124, 233 Calley, William, 239 Cambiemos. See Let’s Change coalition (Argentina) Campos, Eduardo, 175 Campos Sales, Manuel Ferraz, 79 Cannon, Joe, 239 Carlyle, Thomas, 3

Cárdenas, Cuauhtémoc, 176–177, 179, 228, 233 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 21, 25, 27, 37, 106, 113, 123–124, 127, 157, 158, 214, 215, 216, 221, 227, 233 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique (FHC), 37, 162, 169, 171–174, 186, 207, 214, 217, 219, 220, 227, 233 Carnegie, Andrew, 239 Carranza, Venustiano, 21, 37, 122, 233 Carrera, Miguel, 60 Carter, Jimmy, 26, 220, 222, 239 Castelo Branco, Humberto, 37, 118–119, 220, 233 Castilla, Rámon, 37, 59, 93–94, 96, 214, 215, 221, 227 Castillo, Ramón, 133 Castro, Cipriano, 37, 144–145, 233 Castro, Fidel, 9, 20, 21, 25, 156, 192, 211, 212, 214, 216, 217, 233 Castro, Raul, 233 Cavallo, Domingo, 186 caudillismo (warlordism), 18, 63–64, 101 Chamorro, Violeta, 233 Change ’90 Party (Peru), 192 Chase, Salmon P., 239 Chávez, Hugo, 9, 14, 21, 27, 37, 162, 194, 197–199, 209, 211, 214, 218, 221, 222, 225, 233 Cheney, Richard, 239 Chinchilla, Laura, 233 Christian Democrat party (Chile), 152, 153, 154, 156, 201, 203–204, 206, 217 Churchill, Winston, 18 Civic Union (Argentina): movement, 92; party, 92 Civilianist Party (Peru), 94, 136, 137–138 Civilista. See Civilianist Party (Peru) Clay, Henry, 24, 26, 239 Cleveland, Grover, 107, 239 Clinton, Hillary, 168 Clinton, William (Bill), 24, 26, 164–165, 182, 207, 211, 214, 218, 239 Colfax, Schuyler, 239 Collor, Fernando, 37, 169–171, 207, 208, 228, 233 Colosio, Luis Donaldo, 178 Comité de Organización Política Electoral Independiente (COPEI). See Committee

Index

263

of the Independent Electoral Political Organization party (Venezuela) Committee of the Independent Electoral Political Organization party (Venezuela), 146, 147, 148, 149, 156, 197 communists, 140; in Argentina, 133; in Chile, 151, 153, 204, 206; in Colombia, 130; in Venezuela, 146–147 comparative methodology, xiv–xvi Comte, Auguste, 82 Concertación coalition (Chile), 154, 203–204, 205–206, 209, 217, 219 A Concise History of the United States, 23 Connery, William, 239 Conservatives, 31, 102, 161, 226; in Brazil, 76; in Chile, 98–99; in Colombia, 84, 85, 86–88, 126–128, 129, 156, 181, 182, 183, 184, 228; in Mexico, 81; in Peru, 93; in the United States, 110, 163, 165, 166, 168; in Venezuela, 97, 145, 199 Constitutionalist Party (Peru), 136–137 Constitutions, 6–7; in Latin America, x, 18; in the United States, x, 17 Coolidge, Calvin, 239 corporatism, 33, 157–159, 208 Correa, Rafael, 209, 219, 233 Costa e Silva, Artur, 119 Crawford, William, 239 Creel, George, 239

Democratic-Republican Party (United States), 47, 48, 68, 69–70 Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition (Venezuela), 200 Dessalines, Jean-Jacque, 233 Dewey, George, 239 Dewey, Thomas, 239 Díaz, Porfirio, 20, 21, 36, 37, 82–84, 86, 101, 102, 121, 156, 211, 214, 215, 222, 225, 229, 233 Diaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 125 Dickinson, John, 239 Dirceu, José, 175 Dole, Robert, 239 Dorr, Thomas, 239 Douglas, Frederick, 239 Douglas, Stephen, 73, 239 Duarte, José, 233 Dubois, W. E. B., 239 Dulles, John Foster, 239 Dutra, Eurico, 37, 115, 233 Duvalier, François, 233

Darwin, Charles, 57, 76 D’Aubisson, Roberto, 233 De la Madrid, Miguel, 37, 126, 223, 233 De la Mar, José, 59 De la Rúa, Fernando, 186–187 Davis, Jefferson, 239 Debs, Eugene, 239 DeLay, Tom, 239 Deloria, Vine, 239 Democratic Action Party (Venezuela), 146–147, 148, 149, 156 Democratic Party: in Peru, 137, 138; in the United States, 70, 71–72, 73, 107, 110, 163, 165, 167, 168, 218 Democratic Progressive Party (Argentina), 133

Farragut, David, 239 Farrell, Edelmiro, 134 Federalist Party: in Argentina, 57, 58; in the United States, 47, 48, 68, 69, 70 Figueiredo, João, 120 Fillmore, Millard, 239 Flexner, Eleanor, 239 Fonseca, Deodoro, 77–78 Fonseca, Hermes, 79 Ford, Gerald, 239 Foster, Vincent, 239 Foster, William Z., 239 Fox, Vicente, 37, 178–179, 220, 233 Francia, José Gaspar, 233 Franco, Itamar, 171, 172, 207 Franklin, Benjamin, 239 FREDEMO coalition (Peru), 192

Echenique, José Rufino, 96 Echeverría, Luis, 126, 223 Einsten, Albert, 140 Eisenhower, Dwight, 24, 26, 112, 239 Ellsberg, Daniel, 239 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31 Emma of Waldeck-Prymont, 103n1 Ettor, Joseph, 239

264 Frei Montalva, Eduardo, 21, 37, 151–152, 153, 158, 201, 203, 217, 233 Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo, 203, 205 Frémont, John C., 239 Frepaso alliance (Argentina), 186 Frick, Henry, 239 Friedman, Milton, 202 Frondizi, Arturo, 135 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (FARC). See Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia Fujimori, Alberto, 21, 25, 37, 192–193, 194, 195, 207, 208, 220, 222, 225, 228, 233 Fujimori, Keiko, 194, 195 Gaitán, Jorge Eliécer, 37, 127–128, 220, 233 Gallatin, Albert, 239 Gamarra, Augustín, 59 García, Alan, 37, 190, 191, 193, 194, 195, 233 García Calderón, Francisco, 95 Garfield, James, 107, 239 Garrison, William Lloyd, 239 Gaviria, César, 37, 182, 233 Geisel, Ernesto, 120 George, Henry, 239 Gingrich, Newt, 239 Goldman, Emma, 239 Gómez, Juan, 37, 145–146, 199, 214, 217, 222, 233 Gómez, Laureano, 37, 127, 128, 129 Gompers, Samuel, 239 González, Manuel, 82 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 164 Gore, Al, 1, 239 Goulart, João, 21, 37, 116–117, 118, 155, 159, 222, 223, 233 Gould, Jay, 239 Grant, Ulysses, 26, 107, 239 Greeley, Horace, 239 Grimké, Angelina, 239 Grimké, Sarah, 239 group dynamics theory, 227 Guerrero, Vicente, 37, 51, 233 Guevara, Che, 10, 20, 21, 116, 222, 233 Gutiérrez, Tomás, 94 Guzmán, Abimael, 190, 192

Index Guzmán, Antonio, 37, 97, 101 Haldeman, H.R., 239 Hamilton, Alexander, 24, 26, 47, 48, 62, 68, 239 Hancock, John, 239 Harding, Warren, 239 Harrison, Benjamin, 107, 239 Harrison, William, 239 Haya de la Torre, Victor, 20, 37, 139–143, 144, 156, 158, 190, 191, 214, 216, 217, 219, 225, 233 Hayes, Rutherford, 107, 239 Henry, Patrick, 239 Herrera, Olaya, 126 Herrera Campins, Luis, 149 Heywood, Bill, 239 Hidalgo, Miguel, 51, 64, 233 Hiss, Alger, 239 A History of Latin America, 20 The History of Latin America: Collision of Cultures, 19 A History of the United States, 23 Hitchcock, Ethan Allen, 239 Hitler, Adolf, 18 Hoover, Herbert, 110, 239 Hoover, J. Edgar, 239 Hopkins, Harry, 239 House, Edward, 239 Howard, Oliver, 239 Hubbel, Webster, 239 Hudson, Hosea, 239 Huerta, Victoriano, 20, 121–122, 233 Hughes, Charles Evans, 239 Hughes, Langston, 239 Humala, Ollanta, 37, 194, 195, 219 Humphrey, Hubert, 239 Huntington, Samuel, 120 Hussain, Saddam, 166 Hutchinson, Thomas, 239 Hyde, Henry, 239 Ibáñez del Campo, Carlos, 150, 233 Iglesias, Miguel, 96 Institutional Revolutionary Party (Mexico), 123, 124–126, 157, 176–180, 223, 228 Integralists (Brazil), 114 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 34, 117, 185, 187, 192, 196, 197

Index Isabel I, 76, 103n1 Isabella II of Spain, 103n1 Iturbide, Augustín, 37, 51, 52, 64, 225, 233 Izquierda Unida. See United Left Party (Peru) Jackson, Andrew, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 36, 37, 70–72, 100, 101, 106, 107, 211, 214, 215, 222, 226, 229, 239 Jefferson, Thomas, xvi, 24, 26, 36, 37, 48–49, 62, 68, 69–70, 74, 100, 101, 106, 211, 214, 215, 222, 226, 239 João VI of Portugal, 49 Johnson, Andrew, 26, 101, 106–107, 239 Johnson, Lyndon B. (LBJ), 26, 37, 112, 155, 158, 220, 221, 223, 239 Johnston, Albert Sidney, 239 Johnston, Joseph, 239 Jones, Mary Harris, 239 Juárez, Benito, 20, 37, 80–82, 83, 101, 121, 214, 215, 225, 233 Justicialist (Peronist) Party (Argentina), 135 Justo, Augustín, 133 Kennan, George, 239 Kennedy, Edward, 239 Kennedy, John F. (JFK), 24, 26, 112, 155, 165, 239 Kennedy, Robert, 239 King, Martin Luther, 239 King, Rufus, 239 Kirchner, Cristina Fernández, 37, 187–188, 189–190, 207, 209, 219, 233 Kirchner, Nestor, 37, 162, 187, 188, 189–190, 207, 209, 219 Kissinger, Henry, 239 Kleindienst, Richard, 239 Know-Nothing Party (United States), 73 Knox, Henry, 239 Kovic, Ron, 239 Kubitschek, Juscelino, 37, 116, 118, 158, 169, 233 Kuczynski, Pedro Pablo, 195, 233 Labastida, Francisco, 178 Lacerda, Carlos, 115 LaFollete, Robert, 239 Lagos, Ricardo, 203

265

LaGuardia, Fiorello, 239 leadership: articulative, xii, 217, 221, 224, 227; charismatic, xi, 4, 63, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228; consolidating, xii, 224; discipline and theoretical perspectives on, xi–xiii, 2–6, 221–228; disjunctive, xiii, 221, 223, 224, 228; further research on, 228–230; “great man,” 3, 7, 9, 10, 14, 15, 225; identifying outstanding leaders, 18–29, 212–213; ideological, 222, 223, 224, 228; leader-follower relationship, 4, 5, 6; Machiavellian, 222, 224; pragmatic, 222, 224; preemptive, xiii, 221, 223, 224; preparatory, xiii, 224; rationallegal, xi, 4, 63, 221, 225; reconstructive, xii, 212, 223, 224; resisting, 223, 224; studies in Latin America, 9–14; studies in the United States, 8–9; traditional, xi, 4, 63, 221, 225, 226; transactional, xii, 6, 22, 221, 222, 224, 227, 230; transformational, xii, xix, 6, 10, 15, 22, 27, 28, 212–221, 222, 223, 224, 227, 228, 230, 231; utopian, 222, 223, 224 Lee, Henry, 61, 239 Lee, Robert E., 239 Leguía, Augusto, 37, 138, 139, 141, 157, 228 Leoni, Raúl, 148 Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastián, 82 Let’s Change coalition (Argentina), 188 Liberals, 31, 102; in Brazil, 76, 173; in Chile, 98–99, 150; in Colombia, 84, 85–88, 126–129, 156, 181, 182, 183, 184, 220, 228; in Mexico, 81, 83; in Peru, 93, 138; in the United States, 110, 163, 166, 167, 168; in Venezuela, 97, 145 Liliuokalani of Hawaii, 103n1 Lincoln, Abraham, 23, 24, 26, 28, 37, 73–74, 100–101, 106, 107, 109, 154, 211, 214, 215, 217, 221, 229, 239 Lincoln, Mary Todd, 239 Livingston, Robert, 239 Lleras, Alberto, 37, 129 Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 239 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 239 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 239

266

Index

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 76 López, José, 37, 85 López Contreras, Eleazar, 146 López Mateos, Adolfo, 125 López Michelsen, Alfonso, 130 López Obrador, Manuel, 179, 180, 219, 228 López Portillo, José, 126, 223, 233 López Pumarejo, Alfonso, 37, 127, 157, 220 Louis XIII of France, 74–75 Louis XIV of France, 74–75 Luís, Washington, 79 M-19 (Colombia), 130, 131, 182 MacArthur, Douglas, 239 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 3, 222 Macri, Mauricio, 37, 188, 189–190, 207 Madero, Francisco, 21, 37, 83–84, 121, 233 Madison, James, 24, 26, 48, 49, 62, 109, 239 Maduro, Nicolás, 199, 200 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 239 Malcolm X, 239 Mallory, Stephen, 239 Maria II of Portugal, 103n1 Maria Christina of Bourbon-Naplees, 103n1 Maria Christina of Habsburg, 103n1 Mariátegui, José, 19, 20, 37, 139, 140, 190, 233 Márquez, José Ignacio, 85 Marshall, George C., 239 Marshall, John, 239 Marshall, Thurgood, 239 Martí, José, 19, 21, 233 Marx, Karl, xvii, 117 Maximilian I (Ferdinand), 81 McAdoo, William Gibbs, 239 McCarthy, Joseph, 239 McClellan, George B., 239 McKinley, William, 26, 37, 108, 109, 155, 239 McNamara, Robert, 239 MDB (Brazil), 119 Meade, George Gordon, 239 Médici, Garrastazu, 120 Melo, José Maria, 85

Mendoza, Verónika, 195 Menem, Carlos, 37, 186, 187, 189, 190, 207, 208, 220, 233 Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD). See Democratic Unity Roundtable coalition (Venezuela) Miranda, Francisco, 37, 53, 233 Mitre, Bartolomé, 37, 90–91, 92, 233 Modern Latin America, 19 Moe, Terry, xii, 8 monarchy, xvi, 17, 43, 46, 47, 61, 63, 68, 225 Mongas, José Gregorio, 97 Mongas, Tadeo, 97 Monroe, James, 24, 48, 239 Montesinos, Vladimiro, 193 Montt, Jorge, 37 Morais, Prudente, 37, 78 Morales, Evo, 14, 209, 219, 233 Morales, Remingo, 137 Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 144 Moreira, Delfim, 79 Morelos, José, 51, 64, 233 Morgan, J.P., 239 Mosquera, Tomás, 86 Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Peru), 143, 190 National Action Party (Mexico), 176, 178–179, 180 National Autonomy Party (Argentina), 91, 92 National Democratic Union (Brazil), 116 National Democratic Union (Chile), 205 National Liberation Alliance (Brazil), 114 National Renovation Party (Chile), 205 National Republican Party (United States), 72 National Salvation Party (Colombia), 182 neoliberalism, 34, 161–162, 206–209 Neustadt, Richard, 8, 17 Neves, Aécio, 175 Neves, Tancredo, 121, 169 New Majority coalition (Chile), 205 Nieto, Domingo, 59 Nixon, Richard, 26, 163, 220, 239 Norris, George, 239 North, Oliver, 239

Index North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 177 Nueva Mayoría. See New Majority coalition (Chile) Núñez, Rafael, 37, 86–87, 233 Obama, Barack, 37, 167–168, 218 Obregón, Álvaro, 21, 37, 122–123, 233 Odría, Manuel, 142–143 O’Hare, Kate Richards, 239 O’Higgins, Bernardo, 37, 45, 60, 64, 233 oligarchic rule, 100, 101, 102, 105 O’Neill, Thomas P. “Tip,” 239 Orozco, José Clemente, 123 Ortega, Daniel, 209, 219, 233 Ortiz, Roberto, 133 Ospina, Mariano, 86, 128 O’Sullivan, John, 239 Páez, José Antonio, 37, 96, 233 Paine, Thomas, 239 Pardo, Jaime, 131, 181 Pardo, José, 137–138, 139, 156, 229 Pardo, Manuel, 37, 94–95, 96, 136, 137 Parker, Theodore, 239 parliamentarism, 6, 7, 13, 17, 46, 65, 230 Parsons, Albert, 239 Partido Acción Nacional (PAN). See National Action Party (Mexico) Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN). See National Autonomy Party (Argentina) Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). See Party of the Democratic Revolution (Mexico) Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). See Workers Party (Brazil) Partido Popular Cristiano (PPC). See Popular Christian Party (Peru) Partido por la Democracia (PPD). See Party for Democracy (Chile) Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). See Institutional Revolutionary Party (Mexico) Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV). See Socialists in Venezuela. Party for Democracy (Chile), 203 Party of the Democratic Revolution (Mexico), 176, 180 Pasteur, Louis, 76

267

Pastrana, Andrés, 182–183 Patriotic Union (Colombia), 131, 181 A Patriot’s History of the United States, 23, 24 Patton, George, 239 Paz Estenssoro, Victor, 233 Peçanha, Nilo, 37, 79, 225 Pedro I, 37, 49–50, 63, 74, 233 Pedro II, 21, 37, 43, 50, 67, 74–76, 101, 214, 215, 216, 233 Peixoto, Floriano, 37, 78 Pena, Afonso, 79 Peña Nieto, Enrique, 180–181 The Penguin History of Latin America, 19 A People’s History of the United States, 23, 24 Pérez, José Joaquin, 37, 99 Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 37, 147, 148, 233 Perón, Eva (Evita), 37, 134–135, 142, 233 Perón, Isabel, 135 Perón, Juan, 20, 21, 25, 27, 36, 37, 92, 105, 113, 129, 133–135, 142, 157, 211, 214, 216, 221, 225, 227, 228, 229, 233 Perot, Ross, 165 Pershing, John, 239 Pessoa, Epitácio, 79 Phillips, Wendell, 239 Pierce, Franklin, 239 Piérola, Nicolás, 94, 95, 137–138 Pinchot, Gifford, 239 Pinckney, Charles, 239 Piñera, Sebastián, 205, 206 Pinochet, Augusto, 18, 20, 21, 28, 37, 201–203, 206, 207, 208, 211, 214, 218, 233 Plutarch, 3 political development, xvi–xvii; generational change, 31–32; historical eras, xviii, 35–43, 37; independence and after, 33, 45–46, 61–65; national consolidation, 33, 67, 100–102; neoliberal globalization and after, 34–35, 161–162, 206–210; political change, xi, xvii, 1, 2, 14, 212–213, 227, 229, 230; political regimes, xii, xiii, xviii, 35–43, 37, 105, 213, 226, 227, 229; political stability, xvii, 2; state development, 33–34, 105, 154–159 Polk, James, 29, 109, 222, 239

268

Index

Popular Action Party (Peru), 142, 143, 190, 191 Popular Christian Party (Peru), 192 Popular Unity coalition (Chile), 153, 156, 201, 217 populism, xv, xixn1, 195, 209 Portales, Diego, 37, 98, 101, 139, 202, 214, 215, 216, 226, 227, 233 Powell, Colin, 239 Prado, Manuel, 142 Prado, Mariano, 95 Presidential Power, 8 presidentialism, 6, 7, 12, 13, 17, 61; in Latin America, 17–18; in the United States, 17 Prestes, Julio, 113 Prestes, Luís Carlos, 114, 233 Progressivism (United States), 109, 110, 227 Pueyrredón, Juan Martín, 37, 56 Quadros, Janio, 37, 116–117, 150, 233 Quiroga, Facundo, 233 Radical Civic Union party (Argentina), 92, 102, 131–133, 135, 185, 186 Radical Party (Chile), 98, 153 Randolph, A. Philip, 239 Randolph, Edmond, 239 Randolph, John, 239 Reagan, Ronald, 24, 26, 34, 35, 37, 161, 163–164, 167, 168, 206, 207, 211, 214, 217, 218, 222, 226, 239 Renovación Nacional (RN). See National Renovation Party (Chile) Republican Party (United States), 73–74, 106, 163, 165, 167, 168, 218 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, 129–130, 131, 183, 184, 228 Revolutionary Socialist Union (Colombia), 130 Revolutionary Union (Peru), 141 Reyes, Bernardo, 37, 83 Reyes, Rafael, 37, 88, 126, 214, 215, 223, 233 Rice, Condolezza, 239 Rivadavia, Bernardino, 37, 57, 233 Rivera, Diego, 123 Roca, Julio Argentino, 37, 91

Rockefeller, David, 239 Rockefeller, John D., 239 Rodrigues Alves, Francisco, 79 Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 37, 128–129, 233 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 239 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (FDR), xvi, 18, 23, 24, 26, 27, 37, 105, 110, 111, 113, 127, 155, 157, 211, 214, 216, 217, 221, 225, 239 Roosevelt, Theodore, 24, 26, 37, 101, 108–110, 155, 157, 211, 214, 216, 222, 227, 239 Root, Elihu, 239 Rosas, Juan Manuel, 18, 20, 21, 37, 57–58, 60, 64, 89, 90, 101, 102, 214, 225, 233 Rousseff, Dilma, 2, 174, 175–176, 188, 210, 216, 220, 233 Rove, Karl, 239 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 125 Rumsfeld, Donald, 239 Rusk, Dean, 239 Russo, Anthony, 239 Sáenz Peña, Luis, 92 Sáenz Peña, Roque, 92, 131 Salas, Luis, 200 Salgado, Plínio, 233 Salinas, Carlos, 37, 125, 126, 176–178, 220, 223, 233 Samper, Ernesto, 182 Sánchez Cerro, Luis Miguel, 138, 141–142 Sanders, Bernie, 168, 210 Sandino, Augusto, 233 Sanger, Margaret, 239 San Martín, José, x, 21, 37, 45, 46, 51, 56, 59, 60, 64, 233 Santa Anna, Antonio López, x, 37, 52, 53, 64, 81, 214, 221, 233 Santa Cruz, Andrés, 59, 98 Santander, Francisco, 37, 54–55, 84, 85, 233 Santos, Eduardo, 127 Santos, Juan Manuel, 37, 184, 233 Santos Zelaya, José, 233 Sarmiento, Domingo, 21, 37, 90–91, 223, 225, 233 Sarney, José, 37, 169, 200, 233 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 22, 70 Schwartzkopf, Norman, 239

Index Scott, Winfield, 239 semi-presidentialism, 6 Sendero Luminoso. See Shining Path (Peru). Serra, José, 173, 233 Seward, William, 239 Sherman, John, 239 Sherman, Roger, 239 Shining Path (Peru), 144, 190–191, 192, 196 A Short History of the United States, 23 Siena College Research Institute, 24 Silva, Golbery do Couto e, 120 Silva, Lula da, 14, 20, 21, 25, 37, 162, 169, 170, 172–174, 175, 187, 194, 207, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 217, 219, 220, 226, 233 Silva, Marina, 175 Sinclair, Upton, 239 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 123 Sitting Bull, 239 Skowronek, Stephen, xii–xiii, xiv, xvii, 32, 36, 212, 215 Smith, Alfred, 239 Social Democratic Party (Brazil), 116 Socialists: in Argentina, 92, 133; in Chile, 151, 153, 203, 204; in Colombia, 88; in Venezuela, 200 Social Party of National Unity (Colombia), 184 Somoza, Anastasio, 233 Stalin, Joseph, 18 Stanton, Edwin, 239 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 239 Starr, Kenneth, 239 Stephens, Alexander, 239 Stevens, Thaddeus, 239 Stevenson, Adlai, 239 Stuart, Jeb, 239 Subcomandante Marcos, 178 Sucre, Antonio, 233 Sumner, Charles, 239 Taft, Robert, 239 Taft, William, 110, 239 Taney, Roger, 239 Taylor, Zachary, 239 Temer, Michel, 176 Thatcher, Margaret, 136, 161, 162, 206

269

Thurmond, Strom, 239 Tilden, Samuel, 239 Toledo, Alejandro, 37, 192, 193, 194, 195, 233 Tomic, Radomiro, 152, 233 Trujillo, Rafael, 20, 233 Truman, Harry, 24, 26, 112, 211, 214, 216, 221, 223, 239 Trumbo, Dalton, 239 Trump, Donald, 168, 189 Truth, Sojourner, 239 Tubman, Harriet, 239 Tubray, Gabriel, 128 Turbay, Julio, 130 Turner, Nat, 239 Twain, Mark, 31, 107 Tyler, John, 239 Unión Cívica. See Civic Union (Argentina) Unión Cívica Radical (UCR). See Radical Civic Union party (Argentina) Unión Democráta Nacional (UDN). See National Democratic Union (Chile) Unión Patriótica (UP). See Patriotic Union (Colombia) Unitarian Party (Argentina), 57, 89 United Left Party (Peru), 191 Uribe, Álvaro, 37, 183–184, 233 Uriburu, José, 133 Urquiza, Justo José, 37, 58, 89, 233 Van Buren, Martin, 72, 229, 239 Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 239 Vargas, Getúlio, 10, 18, 20, 21, 25, 27, 36, 37, 105, 113–116, 118, 120, 155, 157, 168, 169, 171, 175, 211, 214, 216, 221, 222, 225, 227, 228, 229, 233 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 19, 191–192, 195 Vasconcelos, José, 19, 123, 233 Velasco, Juan, 37, 143, 144, 159, 220, 233 Vesey, Denmark, 239 Victoria I of Great Britain, 103n1 Victoria, Guadalupe, 52 Vigil, Francisco, 60 Villa, Pancho, 20, 21, 122, 233 Vivanco, Manuel Ignacio, 59 Wagner, Richard, 76 Walker, Robert, 239

270 Walker, William, 85, 233 Wallace, George, 239 Wallace, Henry, 239 Warner, Charles Dudley, 107 Warren, Earl, 239 Washington, Booker T., 239 Washington, George, ix, x, xvi, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 37, 43, 46–49, 51, 61–62, 68, 71, 109, 211, 214, 221, 225, 226, 229 Weaver, James, 239 Weber, Max, xi, 4, 63, 221, 222, 225, 239 Webster, Daniel, 239 Weinberger, Caspar, 239 Weyerhauser, Frank, 239 Whigs, 47, 61, 63; Party (United States), 72, 73 Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, 103n1

Index Wilson, Henry Lane, 122 Wilson, Woodrow, 24, 26, 29, 37, 101, 110, 155, 239 Workers Party (Brazil), 169, 172–175, 176, 220 World Bank, 196 World Economic Forum, 209 World Social Forum, 209 Yrigoyen, Hipólito, 37, 92, 102, 132, 158, 233 Zapata, Emiliano, 10, 20, 21, 37, 122, 211, 233 Zedillo, Ernesto, 37, 126, 177, 178, 220, 223, 233 Zelaya, José, 233

About the Authors

Guy Burton has been assistant professor at the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government in Dubai since September 2016. Previously he was assistant professor in the School of Politics, History and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus (2013–2016). He completed his PhD in government at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2009, where he researched leftist governments in Latin America. Dr. Burton employs both the comparative approach and political sociology in his research on Latin American politics, which includes a monograph, journal articles and book chapters on the region’s political left and right. Ted Goertzel is professor emeritus at Rutgers University, where he researched and taught sociology and criminal justice. His interest in Latin America was stimulated as a graduate student in the late 1960s and time spent researching the student movement there. During a long academic career he has written and published on Latin American politics, with a particular emphasis on Brazil. He has written biographies on Presidents Cardoso and Lula as well as more general works on Latin American leadership and political society. Following his retirement from Rutgers, he has occasionally taught at Marietta College.

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