Political Parties in Latin America - A sketch of interpretation

Simon Schwartzman

This is the first draft of "Den politiske prosess i Latin-Amerika", published in Norwegian by Minerva's kvartalsskrift (Oslo, 1, August 1966), special issue on "Latin-Amerika idag" (Latin America Today)

I

The non-specialist is always struck by the incredible mixture of names, dates, persons and ideologies - or lack of ideologies - that emerges from a first approach to the Latin American parties system. "Radical Democratic Party"in El Salvador, "Revolutionary Orthodox Party in Guatemala, "Partido Febreristas"(February Party) in Paraguay, "April and May Revolutionary Party" again in El Salvador, "Political Group 14th of July"in the Dominican Republic, "Liberal Revolutionary Party" in Colombia, "Odristas" in Peru, "Battlistas" in Uruguay, these are just some of the titles that anticipate further puzzles. Because the "Social Democratic Party" in Brazil never had workers, the "Revolutionary Party" in Mexico is also "Institutional". The "Phalange Socialists" in Bolivia has strong fascist colors, while the "Phalange" in Chile, that became later the Christian Democratic Party, is just the opposite, and son on.

It is understandable, from this picture, that so many attempts have been made to explain all this through the appeal to Latin American "style" or "mentality", always prone to accept charismatic caudillos, always personalistic oriented, fond of sonorous names and words. If this is really only a matter of style, it would be meaningless to try to bring some logic to this picture; it would essentially a-logic, if not pre-logic. But even if such "style" exists, this kind of explanation will still beg the question, because it will always have to be located in some more structural reality that could make it meaningful, and the problem of explanation would remain the same. We will prefer to leave this line of reasoning, and see in what ways historical and structural analysis of the Latin American political systems can help us to better order this chaotic picture.

The first fact that must be taken into account is that the LA countries, almost without exception, had borrowed their Constitutional laws from Western Europe and the United States, regardless of the possibilities of their adaptation to local conditions. One consequence of this, as Blankstein has pointed out(1), is that very often the same political function will be performed by different institutions and organizations in different countries, and this fact must be considered is f thorough analysis of the political events and institutions in LA is to be done. If a comparative study is to be made according to this approach, about for instance the legislative, or rule-making function(2) in Paraguay, Chile and Mexico, what had to be compared would be the Chilean Congress, the Paraguayan Armed Forces the and the "Partido Revolucionário Institutional" of Mexico, since these are the bodies that perform the legislative functions in these countries, regardless of their constitutional status.

If what matters is less the legal form and more the actual function, it would be much more meaningful to analyze the groups that fill the functions corresponding to the political parties in the fully developed western political system - functions of interest aggregation - than the groups that call themselves "parties". Blankstein's typology differentiates between the institutional, associational and non-associational political groups. The first includes institutions like the Church or the Armed Forces, the second the formal political parties as well as other associations performing political roles (student associations, labor and managerial organization, etc.) and the third the class, race and regional divisions within the population.

What underlies this approach is the idea that the underdeveloped countries are characterized by institutional indifferentiation, while in the developed ones each function will develop its own specific institution. Thus, while almost all the political competition in developed countries is made through the political party system, a Latin American party will be only one among other interest groups performing the same role. Without going very far in the discussion of this assumption, we must accept that when a political system is stable enough, its legal political system is the natural outlet for political competition among interest groups, according to mutually accepted "rules of the game". The LA countries do not have as yet a stable political system, the social stratification and distribution of power is under continuous change, and the borrowed rules of the game are not equally accepted by all the partners all the time.

But the import of political institutions, as well as of the political party names, slogans and ideologies, was not due to a simple willingness of copying or a lack of political imagination. It has to do with the fact that the LA countries are members of an international system whose more developed members have a clear an systematic influence on the less developed ones, creating in these what is usually called "dualistic systems". A fist element of this dualism is that the LA countries have, in fact, some of the institutional and social characteristics of the North European and American societies, and the import of the political patterns will not be, after all, completely meaningless. But perhaps the most important consequence of this dualism is that, as far as these countries develop, their political questions will be more and more defined in terms of the political problems of the international system to which they belong(3). This means that it is not justifiable to ignore their party systems with the pretext that they do not have, after all, a reality "of their own". In other words, if it is impossible to understand the political system in LA through its translation in terms of the North European or American political concepts alone, it would be even more misleading to deny and avoid any possibility of comparison and mutual reference.

II

Let us examine a little closer the dualistic structure. The most striking feature of this duality, nowadays, is urbanization. Latin America has about ten modern super-towns of more than a million inhabitants, among them Buenos Aires, Mexico City, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro with more than three million each. These towns are in a vertiginous process of grow (10% a year is not an unusual rate of urbanization in Latin America), which creates all kinds of problems of sanitary conditions, housing, employment, etc. Nevertheless, these towns have a very modern aspect. The main industries and university centers are in these towns, contacts with foreign countries are intensive, and the diffusion of mass media is almost as large as in any modern European center. Outside these metropolitan centers the picture can change very quickly: illiteracy grows, the standard of life falls, the consumption of industrial goods is much smaller, traditional forms of interaction prevail - this is the other face of duality.

The use of the expressions "modern" and "traditional" sectors to signify those two faces of LA societies must be made carefully, because it can bring along a false image of rectilineal evolution. First, because this differentiation, at least in Latin America, is as old as the LA countries themselves. It is always useful to remember that colonization started in these countries with the exploitation of some product for the international market - gold, sugar, wood, cotton - and since then the dual structure was established. Three hundred years ago the production of sugar for the world market in the Brazilian Northeast created a Brazilian nobility able to maintain a life style according to the most modern standards of that time.(4) Until recently it was the capital accumulation in a feudal-like system in the countryside that gave the basis for the industrial development and all kinds of modern facilities in the towns. Feudal lords in their farms, modern businessmen in the tows, it is not strange, then, that the independence movements in the early 19th Century were very up-to-date with the ideologies of the French Revolution, and at the same time geared towards the consolidation of their feudal-like system.

The situation in some Latin America is different from others where the colonizers met a traditional society which was able to survive the contacts with the "European Civilization". In this sense LA differs very much from Africa and Asia, and countries like Brazil or Argentina, where the pre-Colombian population was completely exterminated or reduced to insignificant size, are very different from those like Peru, Bolivia and Mexico, where the Spanish met relatively highly developed and densely populated civilizations.

But this difference tends to be less important than appears at the first glance. The Spanish conquerors were very effective in the destruction of the political and economic structure of the pre-Colombian empires, in the elimination of their upper class, and so forth, and the consequence was the establishment of a caste-like system where the low class would be Indian and the upper class Spanish - or "Criollo", the expression used to signify the American - born Spaniard - the latter with contacts both with the traditional and the modern sectors of their country.

On the other had, a process of "traditionalization" can be detected in places where the pre-Colombian societies did not exist, or did not survive to the time of contact with the colonizers. This happened in Brazil, as pointed out by Celso Furtado(5). When the sugar industry in Brazil lost its external market, because of the introduction of sugar cane in the Caribbean region, the consequence was not the transfer of capital and manpower to other profitable economic activities, as would be the case for a typical capitalist enterprise, but the regression to non-capitalist forms of economic and social activities. These economic units were based on slave labor, and the shortage of capital, as a consequence of the amputation of its external side, led to the transformation of the slaves into serfs, and a feudal-like system developed. Other kinds of agricultural, non-export activities were developed, for example cattle grazing for local consumption, or for the towns. It is possible that the social system thus developed was very kin to those arising from the contact between the Spanish and the Pre-Colombian civilizations.

Regarding the urban centers, two kinds of activities contributed to their development, the establishment of the Colonial administration and foreign trade. The Spanish and Portugese colonizers created a complex system of tax collection, and the bureaucracy that was established for this purpose was progressively enlarged to give jobs to European newcomers who did not have a place in the upper rural class. The same European population would work in commercial activities, playing a role of intermediation between the high rural strata and the European markets - or English, to be more precise.

III

This first and simplified sociological background is enough to allow us to imagine a typical LA country in the beginning of the 19th century. Its economy will be based on the export of some agricultural product and the population working in this "modern" sector will be dedicated to non-monetary rural activities, the great majority living in the countryside. At the same time an administrative center will exist, perhaps together with an export center, and the population of this urban center will be working for the colonial administration, or in activities related to exports, or in some marginal activities. The simplified social matrix of this society will be as follows:

  Primary Sector Tertiary Sector
High class land owners ("criollos") high bureaucracy, export groups, Portuguese and Spanish
Low class Peasants, slaves, serfs (Indians, negroes) low urban population (slaves? Portuguese and Spanish?)

Let us see what kind of political activities can be developed in this society.

Regarding the primary sector, only the high groups would have the possibility of interacting beyond the local level, whereas for the low groups the horizon of society will end at the level of their local boss. Conflicts between high local groups can emerge, and the low groups can and probably will take sides. But while these conflicts can be, from a high strata standpoint, a consequence of a clash between political groups at the national level (or, conversely, can be translated to this level, each local group joining a different national political association), the low grupos it will never be more than a conflict between this and that local chief, the national connotations not having any meaning to them. This lack of wide-range contacts will make the low rural strata completely unable to appear on national scene as a political group on its own. This does not mean necessarily that they will always accept their situation without protest, but they will not be able to channel their dissatisfaction in a politically structured way, according to the "modern" rules of the political game. Violent outbursts, bandit, millenary movements, etc, were the normal outlets for the tensions experienced by these groups when reasons for instability appeared.(6) This situation remains practically the same today, with a few exceptions where it was possible for urban leaders to channel the endemic rural tension into rudimentary forms of guerrilla warfare, as in Colombia, Peru and some places in Brazil.

This helps us to understand why we will hardly find any "agrarian" party in Latin America. Te low rural groups have never had the possibility of specific and autonomous political action, and the rural high classes got the national power as a consequence of the independence, their political parties being identical with the national political system in the beginning.

Since before independence, the relations between the high primary and high tertiary groups were one of hostility. The decline of Portugal and Spain as colonial powers reduced their roles in LA to the profiteers of the trade between the new "Criollo" aristocracy and Europe, here mainly represented by Britain. Both would be glad to get rid of the old partner, and this was done. The liberal ideology of freedom if trade, formal equalitarianism, etc., fitted perfectly the new situation. Spain and Portugal were defeated in this fight, and British influence was firmly established.(7)

Spain and Portugal were already defeated when the independence movements started. In 1807 Napoleon occupied Lisbon, provoking the escape of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil, and in 1808 Ferdinand VII of Spain was in French custody, with Napoleon's brother Joseph on the Spanish throne. With the crumbling of the Iberian power, the creole aristocracy took power more or less without difficulty everywhere, and we can interpret the general meaning of the independence wave in LA during this period as a fight between the remainder of the Iberian powers and this aristocracy. Another line of conflict emerges immediately after independence, those who tried to keep power centralized - a kind of duplication of the old political system - and the representatives of the rural, local powers. This cleavage corresponds to the division between "centralists" and "federalists"in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Chile, to the division between the "Portuguese" and the "Brazilian" parties in Brazil, etc. In places with low class uprisings, they were quickly repressed, as in the case of Mexico - and only in Haiti independence was also a truly social revolution, in the sense of changes in the national and local power structure.

Two main lines developed from independence. In some countries, compromise solutions were achieved, and a cleavage between Conservative and Liberal parties emerged - both very alike, the former perhaps with more elements from the old political groups - and they carried on a fairly ordered political life. But in other countries the power of the local "caudillos", developed during the wars of independence, led either to the establishment of lasting dictatorships or to a situation of eternal fight among dictatorial candidates.

We can summarize the political picture that emerges from our ideal type country by the following elements:

a) a formally modern political system was introduced, with legal elements imported from the American Constitution, the French revolution and English liberalism;

b) when this system really worked, it was dominated by the "criollo" aristocracy, with the split between Liberal and Conservative parties;

c) the low rural classes will participate in politics either by supporting some local leader, or by explosions without direct reference to national power. The same will hold for the low urban classes.

d) with the elimination of the Iberian power the weight of the high urban sectors will diminish as an autonomous political group;

e) the political system will be based on the personal power of local leaders, who could very often apply force instead of playing the rules of the game. IV

The main development from this initial pattern is that the relative weight of the tertiary, urban sector will increase progressively, and this increase will have important and specific impact on the political structure.

1. An urban middle class will develop, among the functionaries, trade people, etc. In contact with the new ideas in Europe, sometimes studying there, this middle class will be very alienated from the power system, and will incorporate many rationalistic, anti-clerical and positivistic ideological elements - the most revolutionary they could get. These middle-class people will form the Positivist and Republican groups in Brazil, the radical parties in Argentina, Chile and many other countries.

2. Immigrants started to come in the beginning of the 20th Century, bringing with them all kinds of socialist and anarchist European ideologies. The Social Democratic Party in Argentina is from the end of the 19th Century, and at the beginning of the century Brazil had already leftist political strikes. From these groups emerged, some years later, the Latin American communist parties. The importance of internal, rural migration is a relatively new phenomenon as far as the development of the lower urban class is concerned.

3. But this influx was important at the top of society, The rural aristocracy sent their sons to study in Europe, or to universities that were created in the urban centers. They did not study technical matters - that would be the ideological influence of the middle class, rationalistic and positivist groups - but humanistic subjects, above all law. This educated high class settled in towns, keeping constant contact with the countryside and their families and friends. They were dedicated to political activities, and presented themselves at the national level as representatives - as they were - of the rural groups. More than any other group, they constituted the dominant political strata.

In this process, the local power of the rural administration started to decline. Perhaps a clear distinction must be made at this point between rural activities dedicated to large-scale exports and the semi-feudal aristocracy which which was described above. The first group will tend to be more and more an urban group, directing their rural properties through middlemen, playing important roles in economics and politics. Important as they can be in economic terms, they will in general occupy only a small percentage of the rural areas and population. But the other group will decline in terms of power. They will have increasingly less possibilities of challenging the central power, they will depend on government help for the maintenance of their prestige - for having a road passing through his farm, to have a friend's daughter appointed to the town's school, to have his personal friend as chief of the local police... These favors from the government will be obtained as long as the rural groups keep their friends, or sons, or relatives, in the administration - as long as they have a good deal with the political strata.

Corresponding to this decline of the local powers, the administration will tend to increase in size and importance. The wars between Latin American countries (the Paraguayan War against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, the Pacific War of Chile against Bolivia, the Chaco War...) contributed to the growing of strong and bureaucratized military sectors in these countries, and they contributed to the consolidation of national central powers.

This was more or less the situation until the thirties in Latin America. Let us summarize:

1. We well have two types of countries, one where the political system was unable to develop, where an oligarchy held power since the time of independence. In those countries, there will be a very stable situation, or a succession of local "caudillos";

2. In other countries, the political system will be more or less stable, with this picture of political parties:
 
Social Groups Political Parties
low rural population (no political parties, bandit, millenarism, or supporting local bosses)
high rural population (no political parties of their own. Supporting the "political strata". 
"Political strata" without much contact with urban groups Conservative party.
"Political strata" with some contacts with rural groups Liberal party
Urban middle classes, civil servants, officers Radical parties, positivists.
Urban working class anarchists, communists, etc.
Urban "native" low class (no political organization)

VI

What is more impressive in this picture is that the political system is relatively well integrated, a kind of balance being possible among the groups that are able to exist or manifest themselves politically, with the state working as a kind of linkage between them. But when the relative weight of the urban sector increases further, by the addition of internal migration and the beginning of industrialization, the system starts vacillating.

The main feature of this development is that is was more a social than a economy development properly speaking, in the sense that industrialization comes after urbanization. If compared with the corresponding European development, the relation between industrialization and urbanization is reversed. In Europe economic development brought the people from the countryside or from old craftsmanship, and the extension of political rights and consumption patterns to the working class was a consequence of class conflicts and technological development. But in Latin America both elements, technological development and the political system, were imported, and since then the problem has been how to create the economic structure that had to be their basis...

The process of importing political patterns did not stop with independence. For instance, the fascist theories had a strong appeal among Latin American middle class people during the thirties, as an instrument for developing the state, destroying the old oligarchy and incorporating the new, low urban class into the political system. Sometimes it had just the Nazi style, demagogic, authoritarian, and with some clerical tints - in general very uneffective politically, even if influential at times, as with the "integralist"movement in Brazil, or the "Grupo de Oficiales Unidos"

that sized power in Argentina in 1943. But the Mussolini model proved to be more effective: a strong appeal to the low classes, the incorporation of some advanced social and labor legislation, and at the same time a diffuse ideology that would not go as far as to threaten the traditional dominant class, but far enough to conquer the support of the low urban groups. This model was introduced in a more or less conscious way - as in the cases of Vargas and Perón, but at that time, and from the distance, fascist and socialist ideologies were not perceived as very different, and consistency was not specially needed. After the second world war the fascist ideological manifestations disappeared, but the pattern of already well established, and it fitted the situation quite well.

The political figure corresponding to this pattern is the populist leader (Vargas, Perón, Batista, Odria, Ibañez, Peres Jimenez...) The situation will vary from one country to another, some traits will be more or less common to all countries:

- the populist leader will come from the middle class, in general from the ranks of the army (Vargas being the important exception);

- they will have a strong support in the low urban groups, and will be more or less tolerated by the traditional sectors;

- there will be no clear economic and political program, the demagogic, short run achievements being highly valued;

- corruption will be high in the higher ranks of government.

We can say that this kind of populist leadership found its end in the fifties. At that time, the contradictions of such a non-rational system were too strong, and a counter movement emerged. We can trace three main developments.

1 An enlightened civilian leadership, trying to rationalized the state, with a liberal and modern ideology, middle-class based, and democratic in their aims. These were the Kennedy - type leaders - Frei, Frondizi, Bosh, Betancourt, Figueras, perhaps the early Fidel Castro.

2 Independent leftist movements, that can emerge as a radicalization of the populist supporters, or in opposition to them. The main difference between this group and the populists is that, while the latter orient all their actions in the direction of getting reform programs and welfare policies from government, the former will tend towards independent action, trying to change the political structure as a whole.

The Communist parties will in general be between the two, but in general more on the populist side (in Batista's Cuba, Goulart's Brazil, etc.). Argentina is an interesting case where the Communist party, after being independent during Perón's time (Perón's fascist tints were too much for the Argentinian communists) , tried, unsuccessfully, to unite with the Peronist movement after Perón's fall. The same problem was experienced by the Brazilian communists, against Vargas before the war, together with him from that time until the beginning of the cold war, against him until his suicide in 1954, and together with Vargas' party from then on. The unwillingness of the Cuban Communist Party do support Fidel Castro in the beginning is well known.

The new independent left will find support among students and intellectuals, and will search support among marginal, urban populations and, mainly, among peasants, giving ideological colors to traditional rural, bandit uprisings (in Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela...).

3. The new military. The new patterns of military political activity should be sharply differentiated from former ones. We can distinguish three types and phases in LA militarism. The first is the situation where there is no clear distinction between the General and the "Caudillo". The army is very far from being a stable and differentiated institution, and the succession of coups and "pronunciamientos" are the expression of conflicts between equal groups in competition for political power. The second phase is the rebellion of low military ranks, in association with radical urban classes; the outcome of this kind of militarism is the populist fascist type of ideology and regime. The third phase corresponds to the development of the army as a professional body that will ascribe to itself a level of responsibilities and capacities in national affairs that will not be recognized or accepted by the majority of the population in the countries. We can summarize the ideology of the new military by the following points:

- strong professional and corporative identification;

- strong opposition to populist kinds of politics;

- a basic mistrust on the possibilities of effectiveness from the enlightened civilian leadership, since this leadership will receive support from the old populist and leftist groups, and try to change the established social order.

- an identification between the maintenance of the military corporation and the maintenance of the status quo, on one hand, and between threats to the status quo and Communism, on the other.

The apparent contradiction between the political radicalism and political conservatism of this group is only an expression of the perception that populist, demagogic and "enlightened"leaderships are essentially transitional solutions, and the political participation of the military is explained by the need to avoid "insecure" outcomes. The ideology of security will be identified with the strength of the military corporation, the assurance of the continuity of military assistance from the United States (as a condition for the strength of the military corporation) and national security. From this ideology necessarily follows that order and security are higher values than democracy and development. This being so, it is hardly surprising that the identification of the interests of the old oligarchies and the new military is the general situation wherever military intervention occurred.

In short, in Latin America today, the decision is among these three groups. Cuba is the only example of the leftist solution, and Chile, Venezuela, Peru and Uruguay are examples of civilian leadership. Brazil, Bolivia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala and El Salvador seem to be examples of the new military solution. An Argentina, as the most developed Latin American country, seems to show the beginning of the new post-new military era. The tendency, it seems, is that the civilian leadership will emerge again, but this tendency is still not very clear.

The emergence of the three new kinds of political activities and leadership is a general phenomenon in Latin America, but they found different types of political systems - mainly the differentiation already indicated among countries where a modern political system was able to emerge and others where it was not. Since our analysis was mainly concerned with the first group, let us make some points about the second one.

In these countries, there is a direct confrontation between a "caudillo", traditional government and a population completely alienated from politics so far. There are some possibilities in this confrontation:

- The first case is when it is never achieved, as in Haiti. The country just remains closed to modern development, without much contact with the modern world.

- In other cases, it succeeds, and the traditional structure is destroyed. This was the case of Mexico, where the revolutionary process started in the beginning of the century was strong enough to allow for the emergence of a completely new political system, with the Revolutionary Party dismantling the army and getting total control of the country. The same happened in Bolivia, with the difference that the economic and administrative failure of the revolutionary government, and the creation of a new army after the destruction of the old one created a situation closer to the third group. In Costa Rica, however, the destruction of the army allowed for the development of a stable democracy.

- The third group is characterized by instability. The confrontation is never complete, insurrections are able to destroy part of the oligarchy with the support of others, but never able to give way to a non-oligarchic regime. This situation has the following consequences:

- the destruction of the old oligarchies;

- the development of the independent left;

- the development of new military groups, which end up by seizing power...

We can sum up the results of this sketch by a summary of our conclusions. The first point is that the discussion about the Latin American political parties cannot stop by an appeal to a supposed LA "style", since this would not be the beginning of it. Regarding the functionalist approach, we saw that its usefulness for understanding the roles actually played by political groups and institutions while bypassing their "constitutional" appearance. But the weakness of functional analysis seems to lie in the fact that the most important characteristics of the political system is that it is a system under change which cannot be understood by a synchronic analysis, which will hardly incorporate such elements as the twists in meaning of denominations which will necessarily demand a historical approach.

The lack of correspondence between formal and actual political rules is due to the import or political institutions and ideologies, that is not but one aspect of the general pattern of dualism. We also saw that this dualism does not correspond to a simple differentiation between "modern" and "traditional" sectors, but to a much more complex situation, where the "modern" side can correspond to the politically conservative groups, since it corresponds also to the high classes, and vice-versa. This dualism corresponds to a difference between geographical (rural - urban) regions, but also to two faces of the economic and political behavior or some groups. Finally, this dualism is connected with LA belongingness to an international system, which explains the similarity among the phenomena that occur in these countries - and this is what justifies, after all, our concern with Latin America as a whole entity.

We can now present a classification of the Latin American political parties. This classification is an interpretative scheme, and no attempt will be made to distribute all the political parties in those groups, since this would demand a much more detailed research. The examples given in this classification are simple illustrations.

A) traditional parties, corresponding to the post - independence period:

1. Rural based: Conservative and Liberal (in Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua) and its transformations;

2. Urban based; radical, Republican, Civic parties.

B) oligarchic groups. In general without specific political structure. These groups correspond to the classical LA dictatorships (Trujillo, Somosa...)

C) Transitional parties.

1. Populism, usually connected with a name: Peronists (Argentina), Odriists (Peru), Varguist (Brazil), Ibañezist (Chile)...

2 "enlightened" liberal parties: mainly the Christian Democratic parties (in Chile and Peru), the Acción Democrática in Venezuela, the UCRI in Argentina, etc.

D) revolutionary, pre-Marxist parties. The Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in Mexico, the Revolutionary National Movement (MNR) in Bolivia, the American Revolutionary Popular Action (APRA) in Peru, etc., and their subdivisions after the pre or post failure of their revolutions ("APRA rebelde", "Partido Revolucionário Ortodoxo", etc.).

E) The communist parties, lying between the populist and

F) the new Marxist revolutionary parties (MIR in Venezuela, "Chinese" Communist parties, movements usually associated with dates - 14th of July in the Dominican Republic, 26th of July in Cuba, etc.) To this group it should be added the student movements and organizations in many countries, and peasant guerrilla groups.

G) the middle class fascist groups (parts of UDN in Brazil, "Falange" in Bolivia, "Tacuaras" in Argentina, etc.

H) the new military.

The question now is to ask which countries typically have which kinds of parties, and also which combinations of these parties are more likely to occur - that means, which parties are compatible with which others. A detailed research will be needed do answer these questions, and data about the relative size, recruitment, etc., of each party, must be gathered in order to give meaningful answers to these questions. Some hypothesis could be easily formulated: that the presence of traditional parties is incompatible both with oligarchical systems and with situations where a social revolution had happened that populism will be correlated with militarism and middle-class fascism; that new revolutionary parties will be stronger in oligarchic regimes, etc.


Notes

1. George Blankstein, "Political Groups in Latin America", in John Kautsky, Political Change in Underdeveloped Countries: Nationalism and Communities, New York, J. Wiley and Sons, 1962.

2. According to this functionalist approach, any political system will have to perform the functions of political recruitment, communication, interest articulation, interest aggregation, rule making, rule application and rule adjudication (Kautsky, p. 162). For a more general presentation of this approach, se James S. Coleman, The Politics of Developing Areas. The fact that these political functions are distributed among different political institutions in the developed countries, while in the less developed or traditional countries institutional differentiation can hardly considered to exist, cannot be considered an empirical finding, since this list of functions comes from the observation of the political systems in developed countries. This does not mean necessarily that the functional approach could not be a useful guideline for analysis.

3. For a thorough discussion of the idea of international unification as consequence of modern colonialism and imperialism, see Peter Worsley, The Third World, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1964. His book is mainly concerned with Africa and Asia, but much of what is said applies as well to Latin America. Colonialism disappeared from Latin America about 150 years ago, but what is common between LA and the Afro-Asian countries is what is expressed by the neologism "neo-colonialism", which has the same meaning in Africa and Asia as "semi-colonialism"does in Latin America.

4. For an extensive study of this particular society, see Gilberto Freyre's Masters and Slaves (Casa Grande e Senzala).

5. The Economic Growth of Brazil.

6. The classic work about millenarism in Latin America is Euclides da Cunha Rebellion in the Back lands. For a general discussion of this kind of phenomena, see Eric Hobsbawn, Primitive Rebels, although his work is mostly concerned with European movements. For a general theory, see Neil Smelser, Collective Behavior.

7. We cannot go in the details of the independence movements here. For a detailed account, even if sometimes naive, see Hubert Herring, A History of Latin America, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1961, (2nd edition). <