Dictatorship in South America by Jerry Dávila (review)

The Latin Americanist, December 2016 on the United States, the Caribbean Basin, and slavery by Matthew Pratt Guterl, Edward Rugemer, and others. Aaron Coy Moulton Department of History University of Arkansas, Fayetteville DICTATORSHIP IN SOUTH AMERICA. By Jerry Dávila. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell , 2013, p. 207, $27.95. In the later 1960s and 1970s, a unique type of dictatorship swept over eight South American republics. One by one military, coups toppled the governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In each country, these unprecedented regimes run by military officers who continued to rule instead of relinquishing their power to civilian officials opened an era of radical reform, reaction, and state violence that included detention, torture, murder and disappearance of ordinary citizens. In this thoughtful, well-organized, and readable textbook, Jerry Dávila, a professor of Brazilian History at the University of Illinois, illuminates this period of South American history by comparing three of the most flagrant cases of military rule: Brazil (1964-1988), Chile (1973-1990), and Argentina (1976-1983). He shows that although the length of military control varied between eight and twenty years and that each government was the result of a quite distinct national historical trajectory, the three regimes shared a modernist belief that the state was both capable and obligated to fundamentally transform society to meet specified goals, and the very nature of the dictatorships made it inevitable that they would systematically violate the human rights of their citizens. By comparing these three cases, Dávila seeks to capture the urgency of this extraordinary period for contemporary readers and to help them to understand that if “the stakes were enormous, so were the costs.” (XV) Since the book forms a part of Wiley-Blackwell’s Viewpoints/Puntos de Vista series, which seeks to introduce students to a significant theme or topic in Latin American history, the author has designed the narrative in ways to enlighten and engage an undergraduate audience. The introduction provides an overview of the period and suggests questions for students to ponder as they are working through the information. Dávila points out two possible approaches to consider the tension between politics and economics in the three cases. One way, proposed by Guillermo O’Donnell, argues that the regimes resulted from a state of dependent capitalist development shared by each country. The other emphasizes that these regimes may best be understood by unpacking the vision of the generals who led them and the mindset of the technocrats who sought to construct a bureaucratic-authoritarian framework to counter the 592 Book Reviews utopianism of radical Latin American leftists inspired by the early achievements of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Keeping in mind this classic debate between the primacy of social and economic factors versus the role of politics and ideology, he suggests, will be a helpful key to place into context the legacy of these military governments. After the introduction Dávila divides the historical narrative of each country into two sections to facilitate comparisons. In three sequential chapters (i.e., “Brazil: What Road to Development?”, “Argentina: Between Peronism and Military Rule,” and “Chile: From Pluralistic Socialism to Authoritarian Free Market”), he outlines the conditions provoking the military takeovers and the policies the generals embraced. In the following three chapters: (“Argentina: The Terrorist State,” “Brazil: The Long Road Back,” and “Chile: A ‘Protected Democracy’?”), he covers the events leading to the return of democratic rule and the legacy of each military regime. In his conclusion, Dávila emphasizes that in each case, the military relied on varying degrees of public support including political parties, banks, businesses, sectors of the Church, the United States, and multinational corporations. Decisions by these allies to shift their support to opposition movements proved to be essential to regime change as was the emergence of new left movements which embraced legalism and human rights to de-legitimize the dictatorships and their methods. Best of all, the region, known in 1976 as the “Graveyard of Democracy in South America ,” by 1990 had overcome many unspeakable horrors to be government by democratically elected presidents (184). An extremely helpful and thorough bibliography enhances the value of the text as...