Latin American Presidencies Interrupted

Almost 25 years have passed since Latin America began what has turned out to be the fullest and most enduring experience it has ever had with constitutional democracy. While dictatorships were the norm in the 1960s and 1970s—only Colombia, Costa Rica, and Venezuela avoided authoritarian rule during those decades—today an elected government rules in every Latin American country except Cuba and Haiti. As David Scott Palmer notes, between 1930 and 1980, the 37 countries that make up Latin America underwent 277 changes of government, 104 of which (or 37.5 percent) took place via military coup. From 1980 to 1990, by contrast, only 7 of the 37 changes of government in the region took place through military interventions, just two of which can be fairly described as clearly antidemocratic in intent. The overall number of coups was the lowest for any single decade in Latin American history since independence in the early nineteenth century.1 The coups of the 1980s were confined to just four countries: Bolivia, Haiti, Guatemala, and Paraguay. Since 1990, only Haiti and Peru have seen elected constitutional governments successfully replaced by force. In 1989, Argentines witnessed their country’s first transfer of power from one civilian chief executive to another in more than sixty years. In 2000, Mexico marked its emergence as a multiparty democracy after more than seven decades of one-party rule. Most Latin states have never had so many successive elected governments come to power without authoritarian reversals.2 Nonetheless, the euphoria that accompanied democracy’s rise has begun to wane. Opinion polls show that Latin Americans still broadly Arturo Valenzuela is professor of government and director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University. During the Clinton administration, he was deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs and later senior director for inter-American affairs at the U.S. National Security Council.