Men with guns

Coups can tell us all about democracy. Review: Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982, eds Sebastián Carassai and Kevin Coleman, by Gavin O'Toole

Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982, eds Sebastián Carassai and Kevin Coleman, 2025, Cambridge University Press

Do coups d'état curtail democracy—or correct it?

Put another way, do we interpret a military’s seizure of power as a sudden break with an otherwise “democratic” status quo, or in fact as a reflection of fatal flaws in civilian rule?

These are controversial and uncomfortable questions, but they must be asked if we are to draw any lessons at all from the darkest period in modern Latin American history.

They also stalk every page of this collection edited by Sebastián Carassai and Kevin Coleman and challenge our intellectual reflex to bridle at the sinister implications of military rule and, as a result, create convenient explanations for it.

We fall into a simple contrast between good grey and bad khaki mostly in order to overcome the obvious truth that the coups of the Cold War era exist now only in the realm of memory—and that only by keeping this alive can we avoid their recurrence and safeguard democracy.

Yet the simple truth is that many of the civilian governments displaced by the men with guns in a tidal wave of Latin American coups between 1964–1982 were so far from being democratic in any meaningful sense of the word as to defy such a crude moral contrast.

As Barbara Weinstein points out in her unnerving “Afterword” to this historical survey, a search for common threads forces us to consider not only why coups occur—but why so many people in the region harbour sympathies for military rule, then and now.

Take Brazil, for example, a country where the 1964 coup ushered in a long period of military control which, whilst not being the most repressive in the hemisphere, certainly left deep scars that have yet to heal.

Nonetheless, in the world’s third largest democracy Jair Bolsonaro—a man who lionised the torturers of the military period and openly voiced regret that they did not kill thousands more leftwingers—was still elected to the presidency in 2018 by a margin of 11 million votes.

Weinstein writes: “My point here is that millions of people are casting ballots for politicians who are admirers of, not apologists for, the bygone military dictatorships; they are voting for candidates who overtly acknowledge precisely those aspects of the regimes that we might expect to elicit revulsion from voters in a democracy.”

So how do we explain this—or can we even explain it all by using the case studies in this collection, which focus on a very specific period in Latin America’s political history at a time of global ideological confrontation?

The many problems we encounter in finding straightforward explanations haunt every chapter of this book like ghouls, and if there is a perennial theme to explain military rule at all it resides mostly in the sheer fragility of Latin American democracy.

As Weinstein points out with perspicacity, most commentators assume a golpe entails a sudden, dramatic rupture and that the ensuing regime replaces a democracy, or at least implies a change in political order.

Hard evidence reveals that the truth is far less clear cut: in several of the cases discussed, Bolivia (1964), Uruguay (1973), Argentina (1976), El Salvador, (1979) and Guatemala (1982), the regimes that were overthrown could only be described as democratic in the narrowest sense.

The question that should be asked, says Weinstein, is not about “how democracies die” but why certain political systems that already deprive vast sections of the population of their civil, political and human rights come to be described as democracies in the first place.

In many of the cases discussed in the book, authoritarian elements of political rule had taken root long before military takeover, and in others civilians played an active role in laying the ground for intervention, even inviting it, and supporting the army once they had stepped in, not infrequently to “protect” democracy or even to achieve what they felt it could not.

Other than a few obvious examples of a traumatic golpe marked by the overnight appearance of tanks on the streets—the archetypal example of which is Augusto Pinochet’s overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973—in many cases a coup followed a period of creeping authoritarianism.

By the time Víctor Paz Estenssoro was booted out in Bolivia in 1964, he had already bloodied his hands with severe repression; in Argentina, it was Isabel Perón who had initiated the “dirty war” during her two years in office before the military seized control in 1976; in Uruguay, it was the elected president Juan María Bordaberry who handed power on a plate to the generals in 1973.

Nor is it adequate to retain a simple view of the US as a monolithic imperium constantly looming over the region with only one hegemonic motive in mind—this is far too reductive a notion that ignores significant variation in Washington’s attitude to coups and the stark reality that this was so often influenced by timing.

Considering the role of the US invites us to position its—undoubtedly cynical—protagonism in many of these coup stories alongside other critically important factors from outside the Latin American region in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, such as the role of the USSR, anti-communism across the First World, and the global expansion of transnational capital.

Argentina’s brutal junta took its lessons about how to disappear bodies by dropping them into the sea from helicopters from the French military’s experience in Algeria, not from counterinsurgency doctrines taught at the US School of the Americas.

As the editors point out, the role played by the US in Latin America’s coups was not uniform, heavily determined by context and the prevailing foreign policy approach of different administrations in the Cold War period, from Johnson to Reagan.

We tend to focus on the most egregious example of Washington’s support for military abuses: its active role in the Chilean coup, and Henry Kissinger’s appalling thumbs up for the atrocities of Argentina’s junta.

But the evidence shows clearly that US meddling varied considerably and was reflected as much by inconsistency as congruity, and even at times by insufficient power to avoid outcomes it did not want, as in the 1968 overthrow of Fernando Belaúnde Terry in Peru.

But external interference aside, the most disruptive question that might be asked about the causes of the coups examined by the contributions of this book is, as Weinstein notes with refreshing candour, whether these reflected not too little democracy—but too much.

If even contemplating such a notion takes your breath away, then it is doing precisely what challenging scholarship should be doing, especially in an era when we are struggling to understand the rise of anti-democratic forces in our own midst.

Weinstein puts it thus: “What we saw in various national contexts in Latin America following World War II was not a dispute between the forces of democracy and the forces of dictatorship, but rather between a narrow definition and a capacious definition of democracy and democratic rights.”

In short, the inexorable expansion of the meaning of democracy from the political to the social realm may have meant that, as populists on all sides got wind of the opportunities, a subsequent failure to moderate demands was a contributing factor in its breakdown.

It’s an intriguing perspective because it requires us to go back to basics by seeking consensus on the form democracy should take and, in turn, to reconcile within that the many competing factors at play surrounding equality, the franchise, sovereignty and the role of the state.

Asking this question conjures up eerie parallels today in Europe of a peculiar feature of many of these Latin American coups: the military dictatorships did not present themselves as opponents of democracy, but as acting to create the proper conditions for democracy.

This is the language we are now hearing from the civilian far-right closer to home—and its eventual aim in Latin America was not to erase democracy, but to reinvent it in such a way that it was compatible with inequality and hierarchy.

Ultimately, however, we are left perplexed by the multiple explanations for coups and their many dynamic variables that the Latin American examples included in this book can offer us.

But perhaps this diversity is the best historical lesson these coups can give us at the political juncture we have reached—drawing our attention less to the natural lure of militaries to power, and more to the failure of civilians to wield it responsibly.

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