This chapter examines the coup d’état carried out by General Juan Velasco Alvarado in 1968, a coup that radically differed from the series of military takeovers in the Southern Cone of South America during the height of the Cold War. It seeks to analyze the causes that led to the coup, its principal objectives, and how the United States, in particular the Nixon administration, responded to Peru’s challenge to relations with the US. It further addresses a series of questions such as who the coup makers were, what their social backgrounds were, and what kind of resistance the new regime faced in what became, over the next several years, a radical effort to transform one of the most tradition-bound countries in Latin America in order to modernize it and bring it into the twentieth century.

On March 11, 1973, after seven years of de facto government, Argentina celebrated its return to democracy in an electoral act that seemed to announce a new era. Although the alternation between the military and civilians was not unprecedented, two things led many to assume that coups were being left behind forever. First, after years of proscription, clean elections had led the Peronist movement to the government. Second, the new leader, after eighteen years of exile, was the founder of that movement, Juan Perón. “They’re leaving and never coming back!” – referring to the military – was the chant with which demonstrators celebrated the transfer of power and change of regime. Less than three years later, however, on March 24, 1976, a new military coup broke the constitutional order, with no resistance from either the armed forces or civil sectors. This chapter analyzes the main causes, internal and external, that enabled the military’s return to power. Based on the role played by the most relevant political and social actors, the chapter explains the conditions that made it possible for what was considered buried in 1973 to appear as the only way out in 1976, at least to numerous civil sectors.

Of all the cases studied in this book, the 1972 coup d’état in Honduras is the one we know the least about. General Oswaldo López Arellano, the military general who led the coup, implemented a reformist agenda, the boldest in Central America – and, indeed, among the most progressive in Latin America. Given that his previous coup ended a Honduran experiment with social democracy, this shift away from repression and toward land reform and developmentalism is puzzling. To understand the political choices that led to this coup and its reformist character, this chapter chronologically reconstructs both the conjunctures in which the military could have overthrown the sitting president but did not, and the crucial months leading up to December 4, 1972, when López Arellano did overthrow President Ernesto Cruz. Hondurans anticipated the coup, but they did not know whether it would be, as one editorial writer noted at the time, “from the Left or the Right.” That it ended up being from the Left was not at all foretold by structural conditions – for similar conditions prevailed in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua – and had everything to do with the political decision to address the problems faced by a landless peasantry.

Far from representing the abandonment of civilian government by conservative, pro-military forces in Washington, DC, Bolivia’s 1964 coup d’état occurred over strident objections from the United States. In describing this surprising story of local Cold War golpismo (coup waging) in Latin America, this chapter analyzes the overlapping trajectory of three key groups of actors: the deterioration of the ancien régime of middle-class nationalists (los golpeados), the widespread involvement of liberal developmentalist US officials (los gringos), and the multivalent ideologies and strategies of civilian and military plotters (los golpistas) who brought down twentieth-century Bolivia’s most powerful leader. The case study reveals a superpower’s inability to micromanage political development on the periphery, and it highlights the underappreciated intimacy between civil society and military officers in the social phenomenon known as Latin American golpismo.

This chapter unpacks a critical moment in Salvadoran history: from the coup on October 15, 1979, to the start of the civil war and mass repression during the latter part of 1980. The coup installed a military–civilian junta (the Junta Revolucionaria de Gobierno or JRG) that included moderate leftists who promised a reformist solution to the economic, social, and political crisis, a solution that would prevent a looming civil war. These reforms included land reform, union rights, and an end to political repression. However, disjunction between revolutionary rhetoric and grassroots struggles and necessities impeded an alliance between the JRG and popular organizations. The JRG itself dissolved and re-formed as rightists pushed out representatives of the Left. This chapter discusses the factors that led up to the coup then summarizes the three successive JRGs and how sectors of the military and civil society responded to their reforms, setting the stage for the twelve-year civil war.

Like several of its regional counterparts, Brazil’s 1964 coup attacked a reformist government that threatened the interests of an entrenched elite. To fully understand this attack, we must examine those interests and perceived threats to them, particularly in the realms of culture, religion, and morality. The coup not only fit into international Cold War maneuvering; it also conformed to a decades-long trajectory of moralism-as-countersubversion. Brazil’s coup plotters defined their enemies in terms that were vague, circumscribed by traditionalism, and culturally determined. There was, that is, a determinative tension between the “modernizing conservatism” of the regime and anti-modern forces that helped create it. To putschists and hard-liners, many of whom did not share the developmentalism attributed to the regime’s modernizers, the coup and dictatorship should aim to restore Brazil to a mythic, moralistic, Christian, anti-communist, and hierarchical past. As a result, moralism itself became one of the outstanding characteristics of the regime – and the rise of powerful, often extreme Evangelical conservatism (outsized in Brazil today) grew into the regime’s lasting legacy. Brazil’s towering Evangelical Right, an indomitable hallmark of its twenty-first-century politics, thus owes much to the conspiracy that brought dictatorship to Brazil in 1964.

The September 11, 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular government signaled the end of a radical political experiment, a “democratic road to socialism.” In its 1,000 days in power, Allende’s coalition state instituted a series of substantial political and economic changes, including the socialization of industries, agrarian reform, and the redistribution of wealth and authority. Unidad Popular faced fierce challenges from an increasingly mobilized opposition, who mounted campaigns in congress and in public space that fomented a climate of crisis in which the military might intervene. It also faced pressures from its own supporters, who occupied factories, lands, and city spaces in an effort to convince the state to radicalize the pace of change. Ruthless military intervention sought to “turn back” the political gains of the twentieth century that had reached their apex under Allende, and the military regime headed by Augusto Pinochet turned again and again to state-sponsored terror to entrench a “foundational project” that couple political authoritarianism with a neoliberal economy.