Democracy and Dictatorship

Clashes between democracy and dictatorship have punctuated the history of Latin America for 150 years, ever since it won its political independence. Formal democracy, with all its trappings, was adopted by the new republics at the very moment of their birth. But democracy cannot become a national reality unless adapted to the other national realities. This is what the early leaders of Latin American democracy, by and large, failed to do; and this is why Latin America produced one dictator after another.

Few of these leaders were unaware of the national realities, although many preferred to ignore them, for they did not easily fit into the patterns of democratic thought which these politicians found in European textbooks of political theory or in the Constitution of the United States; they did not even fit well with the accepted cliches of democracy. The 19th-century liberal could not, by definition, doubt that the Church and the Army were reactionary forces. But for the avera...