Insurgency and Military Rule in the Cold War, c. 1945 to c. 1990

The markedly oligarchical nature of second-phase state formation gave way, from about the 1940s, to an evolving but rarely pacific struggle over the limits of political and economic inclusiveness.

Until the 1960s, populist caudillos took the first steps towards a kind of paternalistic incorporation of the masses. Nationalistic and class-based appeals for votes would be paid for with a dose of national esteem, curbs on the plutocratic enemies of the working class and the fatherland, and promises of higher living standards through state-directed economic devel­opment via import-substitution industrialisation. As these largely unsatisfied aspirations increasingly resolved into unruly protests, radical political move­ments, guerrilla warfare and urban terrorism, the armed forces reacted by seizing power from elected civilian governments, abrogating civil and poli­tical rights, actively repressing dissenters, and ruthlessly pursuing insurgent bands and urban terrorist cells in almost every country of the region. A major source of inspiration for these movements was Cuba's popular, putatively liberal-democratic revolution of 1959 to overthrow the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista, anti-communist ally of the United States.

The ‘Cuban model' of development - a thoroughgoing political and social revolution under the guidance of Marxist ideology - rapidly drew adherents throughout Latin America, provoking a massive increase in US support for both counterinsurgency operations and economic development initiatives by the militarised governments of the region. At first, the United States sought to remove the threat at its source by launching a Cuban invasion force of anti­Castro exiles in 1961. In turning back the invasion promptly, decisively and with the evident support of the populace, the regime fortified itself politically and enhanced its prestige abroad; Washington, on the other hand, suffered the disgrace not only of failure but of the unveiling of its hitherto covert role in financing and organising the invasion.

But this was not Washington's first covert effort to change a Latin American government it disapproved of, nor would it be the last. A similar strategy had succeeded in removing an elected, left-wing government from power in Guatemala in 1954, but the role of the United States remained secret until the 1970s. It was tried again in 1980, when the United States sought to undermine the Marxist-oriented government that had seized power in Nicaragua in 1979 under the banner of the Sandinista Front for National Liberation, which had fought a guerrilla war to oust a US-backed dictator. Nicaragua seemed poised to replicate Washington's Cuban nightmare. This time, US participation from 1980 in the organisation and training of a guerrilla force of Nicaraguan exiles based in neighbouring Honduras was promptly revealed, and pridefully acknowledged, by Washington. The US-backed insurgents succeeded in substantially weakening the Nicaraguan government's hold on power, forcing it to hold a competitive election in 1990 won by a pro-US slate of candidates.

Where military rule was firmly established, the generals and their civilian technocrats, guided by a miscellany of liberal-developmentalist ideologies, sought to expand the reach and influence of the state. Import-substitution industrialisation and the statist policies that accompanied it would be carried forward under the care of the generals to their disastrous conclusion in the 1980s, the ‘lost decade' of the region's post-World War II economic history. But the most enduring legacy of this period of military rule would be the unusually cruel and barbarous character of the repression of groups and individuals considered to be subversive by the authorities, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Guatemala. The contours of the repression would not be fully revealed until the epochal institutional changes that broke forth, in almost dialectical fashion, in the next phase of state formation.