Fifteen or 20 years ago South Americans thought they smelled the morning air of Democracy. In 1952 Bolivia’s military government was toppled; in 1955 Juan Perón fell from power, and two years later General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu insisted on handing the Argentinian presidency over to a civilian. Other military men were on the way out: General Odría in Peru, General Rojas Pinilla in Colombia, General Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela, and former sergeant Fulgencia Batista in Cuba; even the dean of dictators, “Generalísimo y Benefactor” Rafael Leónidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, vanished in a burst of gunfire. Democracy blossomed everywhere, except in Nicaragua, which is sort of a family property of the Somozas, and Paraguay, where General Stroessner had himself elected, most democratically as always, for another four-year period of dictatorship, and another, and then another . . .
But today there are military governments in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, and soldiers run the show back-stage in Uruguay. Cuba enjoys a dictatorship which makes Batista’s look like child’s play. What happened in the late Fifties and Sixties to cause this?
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