This chapter uses qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate that internal strife among the Peronist Party’s candidates was crucial in Cambiemos’ rise to power in Argentina in 2015. These divisions even paved the way for Cambiemos to secure the executive positions in eleven of the thirty-three municipalities in the Conurbano Bonaerense, a traditional Peronist stronghold. Peronist infighting benefited Cambiemos in two ways: First, it weakened the electoral competitiveness of Peronist mayoral candidates; second, it left defeated Peronist brokers from the primaries available for recruitment by the opposition. Cambiemos’ local candidates capitalized on this opportunity, building their own networks to challenge Peronist candidates in poor municipalities.

This chapter extends the book’s arguments beyond the context of Argentina to explore their applicability in two of the world’s largest democracies: India and Mexico. It investigates the conditions under which a party can successfully challenge a hegemonic machine in areas marked by segregated vulnerability, and the factors that prompt brokers to switch party allegiances. In both India and Mexico, hegemonic machine parties maintained a quasi-monopoly over broker networks in vulnerable areas for decades, until parties lacking prior territorial bases began to recruit their own networks to challenge these dominant machines. This chapter examines the party linkages to vulnerable poor communities in Mexico and India and analyzes how parties with no prior territorial presence emerged to challenge these established machines. It explores the strategies these challengers used to build networks in areas previously dominated by hegemonic parties, highlighting the broader relevance of the dynamics observed in Argentina.

For the 2019 election, as President Mauricio Macri’s popularity waned, Cambiemos mayors needed to decouple their reelection prospects from those of their presidential candidate. This endeavor required broker networks capable of supporting their campaigns by customizing messages, resources, and ballots to align with voters’ electoral preferences. This chapter explores how Cambiemos mayors in the Conurbano turned to these territorial network strategies. Using in-depth interviews and extensive fieldwork, the chapter illustrates how local Cambiemos candidates leveraged these strategies to survive the election. The chapter also quantitatively tests the hypothesis that brokers are crucial for mayoral candidates’ electoral survival when their presidential candidate is underperforming. It particularly focuses on ticket splitting as a key method for candidates to detach from their parties, serving as an effective proxy for assessing their network strategies. Analyzing the distribution of clipped ballots across electoral circuits offers a deeper understanding of how Cambiemos mayors used their punteros to strategically separate from Macri.

The commodification of brokers and intense Peronist infighting created a window of opportunity for Cambiemos candidates to build their own networks, challenging the Peronist monopoly over broker networks in vulnerable areas. This chapter employs ethnographic research to illustrate how Cambiemos mayors recruited brokers. Drawing on in-depth interviews with mayors and brokers in four Conurbano Bonaerense municipalities – Lanús, Pilar, Quilmes, and Tres de Febrero – it provides a unique account of how these new networks were established over time. The chapter details how mayors recruited militants from Cambiemos allies, disenchanted Peronist brokers, and community leaders who previously had no political experience, thereby strengthening their local networks.

In the Introduction, we define a coup d’état as the unconstitutional replacement of the incumbent executive by military officers or civilians supported by the armed forces, an act that is often accompanied by the suspension of civil guarantees and liberties as well as the nullification of legislative power. We then provide an overview of the economic underpinnings of twentieth-century Latin America and describe the main characteristics of the Cold War in the subcontinent (from the role of the US to the impact of Cuba’s integration into the socialist bloc, from the changing role of the military as an institution to the Doctrine of National Security). We examine the role of the Catholic Church, one of the key actors during this period, in political stability. We close by offering two possible ways to read this book, taking advantage of the comparative framework that its structure offers. Our collective goal in this volume is to explain the end of an era – the Cold War – that conditioned the subcontinent’s transition to democratic regimes, regardless of whether subsequent governments have slanted neoliberal or neo-populist.

The Afterword provides an overview of the different cases and identifies points of convergence and divergence, or of “lumping” and “splitting.” It offers a second reading of the book, one that does not get bogged down in rehashing each case but rather offers a consideration of the whole, providing new ways of thinking about the lessons that can be derived from the previous chapters. It explores the advantages and shortcomings of the various approaches, and helps the reader take away from the volume big and challenging questions for further research.

The history of Guatemala is, sadly, one of Latin America’s richest in coups d’état and bloody civil wars. This chapter analyzes the processes that combined to result in Efraín Ríos Montt’s bloodless coup against Romeo Lucas García in 1982. In the 1970s, the military fought rural guerrillas while expropriating peasants of their land to benefit new landowners from the officer corps. In the cities, the military assassinated numerous leaders of political, union, and student movements. As the Comité de Unidad Campesina attempted to unite indigenous peasants and poor ladinos, the military responded with repression. In this context, the Partido Guatemalteco del Trabajo became less important than the Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres and the Organización Revolucionaria del Pueblo en Armas. The military unleashed a counteroffensive in 1981, supported by Israel, as the US government, under Jimmy Carter, had less tolerance for human rights violations. Under the pretext that peasants were arming themselves to fight the guerrillas, Ríos Montt led a group of junior officers in the overthrow of Lucas García, who had lost legitimacy in the eyes of soldiers. The coup initiated a new strategy against the guerillas and promoted Evangelical Protestantism to marginalize progressive elements in the Catholic Church.

On June 27, 1973, Juan María Bordaberry, the democratically elected president of Uruguay, dissolved the general assembly and remained in office, sharing executive power with the military command. Uruguayans mention this date when asked when was the last coup d’état in their country. However, political and social actors have long disagreed over the exact meaning of this event and few would now reject that it was just one, albeit final and dramatic, step in a relatively long path toward authoritarianism. Things were different after that date in terms of state institutions as well as freedoms and rights for the citizenry, but many analysts have shown that most of these changes were in the making since at least 1968, when Jorge Pacheco Areco took power and governed under repressive measures of exception. A more recent body of literature has gone further back in time to show the importance of previous steps that aligned national politics with the polarized order of the Cold War. This chapter aims at offering a plausible narrative of what happened in the fifteen years before the date of the coup, combining basic historical facts with the changing interpretations that placed and displaced meaning and importance among them.