A jumble of partial democratizing initiatives in mid-century Latin America

Abstract

The “second wave” metaphor is a convenient but somewhat misleading approximation to how the republics of Latin America adjusted to the post-1945 balance of world forces. In a short period the region experienced a reverberating jumble of democratizing experiments. Although these were loosely linked they were also fragmentary, unstable, and potentially clashing. These diverse, kaleidoscopic, and partially reversible processes developed unevenly over time, often recycling prewar concerns. They reflected competing understandings of what democracy might involve. Some features were highly localised, some expressed region-wide linkages, while global influences also played a part.

Keywords:

• Wave metaphors
• kaleidoscopic changes
• regional linkages

Introduction

Did Latin America undergo a second short “democracy wave” after 1945? Or would it be more accurate to say that it experienced a reverberating jumble of democratizing initiatives – incipient, of prolonged gestation, partial, reversible, political, societal, clashing, and perhaps even evanescent – that may have been loosely linked, but were also fragmentary and autopoietic, and varying markedly in impact both across space and over time? This collection of episodes provides striking coverage of a range of historical developments that took place in multiple sites throughout Latin America in the aftermath of the Allied Victory of 1945.

Unquestionably, the crushing of the Third Reich and Japanese imperialism was a true watershed in global politics. It eliminated fascist projects of world conquest, enshrined US economic and political hegemony over the post-war order, underpinned the UN and Bretton Woods system as a successor to the failed League of Nations, triggered the dismantling of the old European empires, and cleared the path for the emergence of a Soviet bloc challenge to the predominant West. Under military occupation, Germany, Italy, and Japan underwent fundamental changes in their political regimes. Other major powers, such as France, were also re-democratized in the wake of invasion and liberation. Washington (backed by London and its Commonwealth allies) became the global guarantor of this Western post-war dispensation. It generated powerful demonstration effects that were also felt throughout the Americas.

This provides a basis for the shorthand reference to a “second wave” of democratization in Latin America in the 1940s. The plausibility of the term was underpinned after 1989 by the Soviet bloc collapse that precipitated what – following Huntington (1993) – is generally known as the “third” wave of global democratization. However, on closer inspection, this overarching schema provides a deceptive impression of the dynamics reshaping Latin American politics in the 1940s. It distracts attention from crucial variations between countries and across issue areas. It also blurs the diverse policy objectives of the key forces in contention and foreshortens their time horizons. Moreover, from a more long-run perspective, neither 1945 nor 1989 produced anything like the uniform democratizing effects implied by the wave metaphor. This introductory article outlines a more contextually grounded perspective and reflects on the pitfalls of the “global wave” framework.

Indeed, the comprehensive mid-1940s remodelling of the prevailing world order was also profoundly consequential for the other nations and peoples of the Western hemisphere. Latin America had not been a site of military conflict, and its economic base was only buffeted and not devastated by a world war whose impact was disturbing, dislocating, and stimulating. Urbanization, inward-looking development, and economic nationalism altered the balance of domestic forces, but the sub-continent’s post-war prospects were uncertain and a source of contention. On the political front, unresolved ideological conflicts from the pre-war period took new directions as North American substitutes displaced European influences and as oligarchical practices came under renewed pressure from the inchoate forces of wider urban and popular political mobilization. Initially, the Latin American republics enjoyed great numerical strength in the new UN system and played an essential role in some foundational matters. Still, their peripheral status was always evident, and the deepening of the Cold War quickly eclipsed their margin for manoeuvre.

Such were the background conditions impacting Latin America’s political struggles for what has sometimes been labelled a “second wave” of democratization in the 1940s. However, that shorthand is problematic for this large world region. The liberation of other major parts of the world by Allied Forces might have involved some application of the promised “Four Freedoms,’ but no comparable apparatus of control operated in the Americas. Instead, any accompanying hopes or promises of political reform were filtered through a multiplicity of local actors, each with their own rival interests and agendas. As for the more specific project of “democracy,” the local climate in 1945 favoured that kind of experimentation in, without that sense, but with little clarity on the specifics. In general terms, such elements as competitive elections, media pluralism, and the alternation of officeholders were already familiar features of Latin American political discourse. But long experience had taught how easily this prospectus could be twisted to serve partisan interests. In the new setting of 1945, it was easier to agree on which established political arrangements should be eliminated no longer served than to decide on their replacements. So, what typically energized political reformers (and frequently alarmed their rivals) was a discordant jumble of partial and improvised projects and uncertain initiatives.

In terms of conventional “regime type” comparative political analysis, a handful of republics did indeed transition from autocracy (military or personalist patterns of rule) to electorally competitive systems in the 1940s. Three pro-democracy uprisings in 1944 in Central America (starting with a pro-Axis attempted coup in El Salvador in April, followed after the Normandy landings by student-led anti-dictatorship rebellions in Guatemala and Honduras and again in El Salvador) can undoubtedly be classified as a cluster of linked regime changes if not exactly a big wave. The three ousted dictators derived from the 1930 Depression and had a history of mutual support. Upheavals in Bolivia and Venezuela in 1945 displayed some analogous features (Bolivia’s President was hung from a lamp post in the style of Mussolini), although these should not be overstated. Some resulted in electoral democracy, but many did not. However, a similar number displayed authoritarian outcomes – as in Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, and Nicaragua. There was some genuine evidence of regime change in the two most substantial nations – Brazil and Mexico – but in the first case, the outgoing dictator retained a major presence, and in the second, the rise of civilian authority was channelled through a system of one-party dominance. The 1940s witnessed a mixed pattern of regime changes driven mostly by domestic forces across the sub-continent rather than a globally coordinated shift towards constitutional democracy. In the immediate aftermath of 1945, a general upsurge in demands for political reform generated multiple innovations, but most were partial and short-term. Then, the Cold War promptly closed down many of these incipient attempts at political opening.

As the varied articles in this collection illustrate, the 1940s were a period of great political uncertainty and instability in Latin America. There is a striking parallel with how Clark has just summarised the turbulent politics of Europe in 1848. “The Europeans of this era charted highly idiosyncratic journeys across an archipelago of arguments and chains of thought … There was no binary cleavage, but a plethora of fractures running in every direction” (Clark 2023, 11–12). In such situations, the wave metaphor risks imposing a retrospective structure of interpretation that obscures and forecloses more than it illuminates.

This overview proceeds on that basis. It begins by highlighting the limitations of the wave metaphor. Then it surveys the preceding chapters under the headings location, time period, diversity, commonalities, linkages, regional specificity, and competing projects, considering major democratizing initiatives not included here under each rubric. The concluding section situates these clusters within a global and comparative perspective.

The limits of the wave metaphor

Wave theory is foundational in the natural sciences, encompassing basic phenomena from sound, radio, and light waves to quantum mechanics, all within a rigorous and parsimonious framework of measurable dimensions such as amplitude, frequency, and wavelength. One subset concerns bodies of water and provides imagery for social theorizing. Maritime waves obey a small set of precise and reliable physical principles since they operate at the boundaries between sea and air, coast and ocean, and exist through the interactions of three simple and contrasting forms of matter: solids, liquids, and gases. Scientific modelling delivers reliable and generalizable analyses of such waveforms and types – tidal waves, wind waves, ocean swells, and tsunamis- and can all be measured, classified, and predicted with considerable precision.

None of these features hold when the imagery of “wave-like” action is transferred from nature to the social realm. Such a transfer borrows from the intellectual authority of the physical sciences to lend plausibility to a set of claims about regularities in collective behaviour that might otherwise be greeted with well-founded scepticism. The appearance of necessary connection conveyed by the language of wave-action circumvents such doubts. It creates what Kuran and Sunstein have termed an “availability cascade” – a self-reinforcing cycle that explains the development of certain kinds of collective beliefs. A novel idea or insight, usually one that seems to explain a complex process in a simple or straightforward manner, gains rapid currency in the popular discourse by its simplicity and apparent insightfulness. Its rising popularity triggers a chain reaction within the social network: individuals adopt the new insight because other people within the network have adopted it, and on its face, it seems plausible. The reason for this increased use and popularity of the new idea involves both the availability of the previously obscure term or idea and the need of individuals using the term or idea to appear to be current with the stated beliefs and ideas of others, regardless of whether they fully believe in the idea that they are expressing. Their need for social acceptance and the apparent sophistication of the new insight overwhelm their critical thinking (Kuran and Sunstein 1999).

Mainstream political science has embraced this “wave” language to organize its analysis of global rhythms and patterns of revolutionary change, including political democratization. These two major political phenomena undoubtedly occur in clusters and connected sequences, even if they differ from one another, and involve opaque and heterogeneous elements linked through complex and many-stranded interactions. Thus, for example, in addition to labelling the European Revolutions of 1848 as a “wave,” Weyland also deploys the image of the “tsunami of 1848” (which he contrasts to the “delayed” wave of 1917–19 and the “slow but potent” Third Wave). His main concern is with the ingredients for success in Latin America in the last of these sequences (Weyland 2014).

In fact, Europe’s 1848 was initially known as the “springtime of nations” (before most of the revolutions failed), much like the recent popularity of the term “Arab spring” before the seasons changed.¹ Recent extensions of this deceptive nominalism include labelling the election of adjacent left-wing governments in South America as a “pink tide.” But whereas tides and seasons and maritime surges have simple and reliable causal determinants, none of these international political regime shifts can so readily be encapsulated in the same manner. For example, nineteenth-century demands for democratization were concerned mainly with working out what this untested concept might mean in practice (with much variation and contestation as the Innes and Philp (2013, 2018) project “re-imagining democracy” project attests.

Successive international “waves” are usually traced to “world-historical” events, such as the (actually European rather than global) French Revolutions of 1789 and 1848 and the wider geopolitical watersheds of 1918, 1945, and 1989. However, it is doubtful whether these successive causal triggers were all that similar, either in their inner nature or their outer impact. For example, 1918 marked the termination of a longstanding European balance of imperial powers. Still, there followed not a stable League of Nations that might have facilitated democratization but instead, a spiral of militarism culminating in the Axis bid for world supremacy. In the same way, the Allied Victory of 1945 inaugurated a United Nations system apparently favourable to democracy but immediately overshadowed by the atom bomb and the “Iron Curtain.” If each of these upheavals created “waves” of outflowing effects, it was through the spread of ideas and the rebalancing of interests and alliances that these were transmitted rather than via any uniform or mechanical causal processes.

Location

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Cuba all receive specific coverage in this collection, which also contains two contributions with a Latin America-wide scope. So, the locus of attention includes the Caribbean and the sub-continent, with attention directed to political units derived from the former Iberian empires. The colonial possessions of Britain, France, and the Netherlands are not considered here, although some aspects of mid-century political opening were also important there. For example, press freedom, the right to organize trade unions and to strike, and electoral competition with broad suffrage were established well before the larger of these territories achieved independence in the 1960s. Haiti also underwent a brief experiment with more open, somewhat reformist politics in the late 1940s. Reverting to Latin America, stricto sensu, the Central American subregion also displayed a distinctive political trajectory reflecting the legacy of prior US gunboat diplomacy and the local power of the United Fruit Company. The case can also be made that Mexico’s post-revolutionary order requires separate consideration due to its ejidal alternative to landlord domination and its drastic subordination of the Catholic church. Many in the sizeable Japanese-born population of São Paulo educated in emperor worship found Tokyo’s 1945 capitulation so unimaginable that they dismissed it as more Vargas propaganda (Smith 1979, 60–1). Other enclaves of opinion owing a solid allegiance to say, the Vatican, Moscow, or indeed the defeated Axis powers, were no doubt disoriented by Hiroshima, and more generally, any initial elation over the Allied victories would soon be tempered by the ensuing anxieties and uncertainties. All these geographically scattered reactions indicate that post-war Latin America constituted a mosaic of arenas for democratic experimentation. Given this latticework of political traditions and local rivalries, although partial, uncoordinated, and conflicting attempts at reform and inclusion may proliferate, such episodes obey disparate temporal rhythms and produce highly divergent outcomes. Here, too Clark’s observations about 1848 again seem pertinent: “The further we get geographically from Europe, the less suitable the metaphor of ‘impact’ becomes – the diffusion of content becomes less important than selective readings from afar, driven by local processes of political differentiation and conflict” (Clark 2023, 13).

Time period

The modal period for democratic experimentation in this region may have been the late 1940s, but actual dates vary a good deal, depending on the country concerned and the features of reform in question. For example, although there was a powerful and region-wide drive for the expansion and democratization of higher education in mid-century Latin America, its expansion and diffusion were slow-burning processes, with no overall single and decisive breakthrough. The overspill from this sectoral experiment into other arenas of political inclusion was lagged and indirect.

The university reform movement began in Cordoba, Argentina, in 1918 and was taken up by an International Student Congress as early as 1921. It empowered these venerable elite institutions to redefine curricula, manage budgets, and directly elect authorities. It spread across the region over the ensuing decades. In 1931, radical university autonomy was established in Bolivia, followed by Mexico in 1933, Cuba under the 1940 constitution, Ecuador in 1945, and Venezuela in 1958. It was not until the 1980s that a weaker version was adopted in Brazil and then Colombia. In all these countries, reform involved extended struggles over the nature and extent of democratic control over universities, with significant deviations and reversals along the way. There was no single decisive breakthrough or cresting of a “wave.”

Another democratizing reform concerns the enfranchisement of illiterates. This began in Mexico in 1857, with the Dominican Republic, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and Honduras following during the nineteenth century. Argentina did so in 1912, Costa Rica in 1913, and Uruguay in 1918. If the 1940s were modal, this was only because of Colombia in 1936, El Salvador in 1945, Guatemala in 1946, Venezuela in 1947, and (as discussed by Álvarez in this collection) Bolivia in 1952. Chile delayed until 1970, Ecuador waited till 1978, followed by Peru in 1979. The last to fall in line was Brazil in 1985. Obviously, the social and political meaning of this reform varied considerably according to the demographic realities of each country and period.

The enfranchisement of women was more clearly a mid-century reform, but even here the spread of dates was quite wide, starting with Brazil in 1932 and ending with Paraguay in 1961. The political significance of this reform also depended on how it interacted with the enfranchisement of illiterates. Thus, in Brazil, literate women gained the vote half a century before illiterates, whereas in Mexico, universal male suffrage preceded female enfranchisement by almost a century. The Álvarez contribution on the Bolivian case highlights the class/race imbalance associated with such differential sequencing (Aidt and Eterovic 2011; Eterovic and Sweet 2011, Table 1, p. 29).

David Rock’s account of the ambiguities of enfranchisement conveys some of the complexities involved: “A common approach was to attempt to co-opt the masses by the extension of the franchise or, alternatively, to seek to exclude them by restricting it. Incorporation became a common trend during the mid-1940s, exclusion during the late 1940s and 1950s. Occasionally these two processes occurred almost simultaneously. Thus, in Chile the proscription of the Communists in 1947–8 was followed by the enfranchisement of women in 1949, although women who were also Communists continued under a ban” (Rock 1994, 226).

Another partial but relevant indicator of democratic progress is the assertion of effective civilian control over the military. In Mexico, this took place at the time of the Alemán presidency (1946–52), and in Bolivia, it followed the 1952 revolution. However, in Venezuela, the 1944 advance was reversed in 1948, similarly in Peru, while in Colombia and Cuba, military dominance was imposed in 1952. As Nallim’s contribution demonstrates, the Peron decade (1945–56) eludes neat classification under this rubric in Argentina. Similar ambiguities arise elsewhere, notably in Ecuador and Guatemala. Each of these democratizing initiatives – and others like them – may have displayed a slight modal concentration around mid-century. But the temporal dispersions were so large, and the sequential patterns so varied, that no credible region-wide timing regularity can be asserted.

Diversity

Contemporary political science recognizes several “varieties” of democracy – liberal, participatory, deliberative, and so on. It also assembles a multiplicity of indicators, including electoral integrity, rule of law, corruption control, and social inclusion. Eighty years ago, the range of possible variations and potential arenas of democratic action was believed to be broader than it is today. All the democratic regimes of interest here were constitutionalist and presidential, but democratic aspirations were not confined to institutional and electoral issues. National sovereignty, economic control, and social articulation were seen as equally relevant arenas for popular engagement and inclusion. Therefore, the sources of evidence concerning the advance or retreat of democratizing initiatives were both miscellaneous and incipient. Students might well consider university autonomy a key litmus test, whereas landless peasants could focus on hacendado privileges, schoolteachers might regard basic literacy as the essential priority, other groups might stress reforming the church hierarchy or holding business accountable to a workforce increasingly organized into sindicatos; in the more traditional political arena, party-building could attract more enthusiasm than congressional logrolling; and for nationalists, defining boundaries and securing natural resources might represent the highest ambitions of democratic state-building. In brief, the dimensions of potential inclusive reform were manifold and underdeveloped.

The rise of organized labour and the spread of mass literacy were two of the most crucial arenas of mid-century democratic experimentation, so for illustrative purposes, two items from this collection can be taken as exemplary: the emergence of trade unions and the expansion of an autonomous newspaper industry. Regarding labour organizations and the right to strike, this facet of political inclusion was already in evidence well before the mid-century. However, the earliest stirrings of worker activism were often anarchic and confrontational, whereas by the 1940s, stronger and more experienced sindicatos had often developed better systems of control and alliance-building with ambitious political strategies and adaptive leadership. Employers and public authorities had frequently also moved from crude repression to institutional accommodation, not least when working-class voters became a clientele worth bidding for. In this sense, mid-century trade unions emerged as substantial new players in the arena of democratization (Bethell and Roxborough 1992).

Still, the impact of labour activism was both highly uneven and unstable over time, leaving much scope for lurches into unsustainable radicalism and reversions back to implacable repression. Communist influences peaked around this time and complicated the situation by conflating worker demands with revolutionary ambitions. Personalist leaders such as Perón and Vargas also intervened, building what became known as classical Latin American populist coalitions on a foundation of labour corporatism and partisan mobilization. The turbulent trajectories of these various initiatives varied markedly from country to country, with more setbacks than durable welfare breakthroughs, but for good or ill, this facet of societal-cum-political democratization reshaped the balance of class forces with lasting repercussions across the sub-continent. No adequate account of mid-century democratization efforts in Latin America can overlook this powerful and ambivalent strand of political experimentation.

The mid-twentieth century was also a significant period of innovation in terms of political communications. Urbanization and widespread literacy created a mass market for daily newspapers at a time when broadcasting was still incipient. The democratizing content of influential newspapers can be reconstructed through careful reading of these sources, with results that can be surprising and enlightening. Still, relatively few studies of this kind have been undertaken so far.² In terms of political inclusion, the expansion of radio news reached many who did not buy newspapers. However, the two sources of information interacted and competed for a mass audience, with the older middle-class-oriented press often at loggerheads with the broadcasters’ more immediate and sensationalist coverage. The unstable career trajectories of such prominent political communicators as Carlos Lacerda and Eduardo Chibas reflected this fraught climate over control of the news, understood as a weapon of combat.

In response to this challenge and drawing on the precedents of wartime censorship, Latin American governments often sought to domesticate the newly assertive mass media. In 1942, the Interamerican Press Association (SIPIAPA) was founded in Mexico to promote the interest of established newspaper editors. In 1950 it was reorganized in New York and given a more assertive mandate, aiming to “protect the freedom of the press in the Americas and defend and promote the right of the American peoples to be fully and freely informed through an independent press; foster and protect press freedom by publishing facts of any action or attempt to restrict that freedom in the Western Hemisphere; promote and maintain the dignity, rights and responsibilities of the profession of journalism; promote greater exchange among American peoples in support of basic principles of a free society and individual liberty.” Operating out of Miami in the post-War period the SIPIAPA became a vigorous champion for the established private press against both government controls and also competition from “unprofessional” upstart rivals. Not infrequently, Latin American disputes over press freedom blurred into conflicts over what kind of media coverage was desirable given the rise of national-populist political challengers. As with the emergence of labour activism, contestation involved clashing conceptions of what kind of democracy to aim for.

Linkages

This kaleidoscopic and reverberating jumble of partial and competitive democratizing initiatives took different forms, and developed unevenly over time, throughout the diverse republics of Latin America around mid-twentieth century. However, the episodes noted above were not purely local or isolated activity fragments. There were complex linkages between them within each country and across the hemisphere. Consider the two illustrative items discussed above. Within each nation, labour organizations gained traction in response to both economic developments (notably import-substituting industrialization in the wake of the world depression of 1929) and to policy innovations such as the establishment of labour ministries and the construction of corporatist employment systems. Rival socialist, communist, Catholic and nationalist factions competed for sindicato allies, while employers set up yellow unions. So, the mobilization of organized labour was intimately linked with an array of broader political developments, some of which had more democratizing potential than others. Whereas traditionally conservative newspaper editors viewed labour activism with little sympathy, a new set of publishers and broadcasters entered the public arena as champions of the cause, hoping to capture a growing new market of working-class customers. Linked-up developments of this type followed distinctive trajectories in each country but also reflected region-wide patterns. Some international linkages arose through diffusion, while others (such as the Confederation of Latin American Workers (CTAL) on the labour front and the SIPIAPA in the press sector) were more formally structured and hierarchically organized.

The CTAL and the SIPIAPA were just two of the multiple regional and international channels through which specific types of democratizing impact could be diffused, directed, or redirected in the Americas in the mid-century. The Prados contribution vividly portrays the 1950 reformist Congress in Havana. This overlapped with such parallel groupings as the Caribbean Legion and the international outreach of the project for Indo-America of the Peruvian American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana, APRA). It can also be seen as a reaction to the Stalinism of Moscow’s newly reconfigured Cominform and to Washington’s creation of the Organization of American States (OAS) in Bogotá in 1948, during the Bogotazo that followed the assassination of the radical Liberal politician Gaitán.

What can be said more generally about these many competitive and incomplete proposals for reform and political innovation is that they were overlapping, interactive, unstable and, for the most part, ambivalent with regard to critical aspects of the supposedly region-wide democratizing agenda. Conflicting conceptions of democracy were certainly at stake here; each of these contenders was as interested in prevailing over its rivals as in perfecting an overall liberal democratic agenda. The López Martínez contribution on Contorno provides insight into some of the cross-pressures at work.

Underlying commonalities

Despite the diversity and fragmentation of this miscellany of potentially democratizing experiments, some underlying commonalities were also present, so it is reasonable to reflect on whether Huntington (1991) was justified in labelling this the world’s “second wave” of democratization or whether another designation may more accurately convey the scope and limitations of this cluster of political episodes. If 1945 saw a “second” wave, when was the first? Huntington associated it with Jacksonian democracy in the USA in the 1830s, but – as noted by Kurzman (1998) – this barely registered beyond one limited location. As far as Latin America (and Europe) was concerned, the French Revolution and its outspreading sequels provides a more credible starting point. As noted above, for Weyland (2014), the European Revolutions of 1848 constitute the first benchmark.³ Note the constrained geographical scope of these alternative nineteenth-century precedents, none of which can be considered truly global turning points in world politics. In practice, where democracy is concerned, the diffusion effects inherent in the very notion of wave action are invariably more local and regional than fully global. Arguably, therefore, if Latin America experienced a second wave in 1945, this was the successor to a previous regional cluster of regime changes- perhaps the nineteenth-century establishment of constitutional republics in the Americas, a geographically restricted set of polities that excluded large portions of the population from citizenship and that experienced periodic “revolutionary” confrontations over electoral issues (Posada-CarbóPosada-Carbó and Robertson 2024).

From a global history perspective, 1918 makes a more plausible watershed: “The breakdown of the European continental empires announced the conclusive triumph of democratic legitimacy, or popular sovereignty, as the only generally recognized principle of legitimacy. The victory of the democratic over the dynastic principle, however, was just that – the victory of a general principle of validity, not of any precise institutional arrangement or a discernible normative spirit. The more concrete meaning (…) remained a matter of contestation between – and even within – the different modern ideological families” (Magalhães 2022, 14).

On this basis, Habermas characterized 1945 as a second “normative watershed” whereby, according to him, the Allied Victory “undermined the foundations of all forms of political legitimation that did not subscribe to the universalist spirit of political enlightenment” (Habermas 2001, 46). Following that scheme, it was once again a geopolitical breakpoint (that of 1989) that precipitated the most recent global “third wave.” Yet all three of these international upheavals were followed not by settled liberal democratic dispensations but rather by new clashes between competing conceptions of what might qualify as legitimate political regimes (neither the “end of history” nor the spirit of Enlightenment abolished religious, nationalist, racist, or other foundationally incommensurate political ideologies). In each case, the timing and location of the resulting outcomes were highly variable and uneven.

Regional specificity

As Nallim observes, the claim that Latin America was reshaped by a second global “wave” of democratizing activities privileges international geopolitical forces as the causal driving force, side-lining the nuances of regional and single-country politics. But even if we accept at face value the democratic rhetoric deployed by the victorious Western allies of 1945, Latin America’s hemispheric characteristics still set it aside from all other large world regions. In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the Allied victory was led by European imperial powers that had by no means reconciled themselves to decolonization. Only the republics of Latin America (and not the colonies of the Caribbean) possessed the formal sovereignty within which democratic claims to self-rule could develop unhampered by the constraints of alien rule. Some of these had only recently shaken off virtual or actual US control under the guise of gunboat diplomacy (Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama – still partitioned by the Canal Zone – and Puerto Rico, which was still very much a powerless colony).

It was only in South America following the borders established after the Chaco War and the Peru-Ecuador clash, and in Mexico (once Washington had become reconciled to the post-revolutionary settlement) that full territorial sovereignty was assured. The “banana republics” of Central America were perhaps semi-sovereign. In any case, compared to the rest of the globe, these regimes were all favourably positioned for autonomous democratic experimentation – not war-damaged, not highly regimented, and not directly at risk from Great Power clashes. The only other large region with a similar scope for rapid democratic advance was Western Europe, where the aftermath of the war was more threatening. Still, the arrival of Marshall Aid was also more supportive (Latin American bids for similar assistance went unanswered until the Cuban Revolution).

Since the international context for the region was permissive rather than prescriptive, with the world’s political energies directed elsewhere, any upsurge in political reform would be heavily shaped by the balance of domestic and regional forces rather than by the imposition of some uniform Allied blueprint. This was the context in which competitive, tentative, and fragmentary democratizing initiatives were to emerge from within the region. For those who cannot resist loose maritime metaphors, rather than a tsunami or cascade or coordinated wave, a series of eddies and counter-currents would better characterize the fluid and unstable panorama of the upheavals of the 1940s. The only genuine merit of such imagery is that it directs attention to the connectedness of scattered episodes across the sub-continent and, therefore, corrects the tendency of national analysts to see each political trajectory in self-contained single-country terms.

Competing projects

Madison’s contribution on the trajectory of democratic politics in the largest Latin republic, clarifies the pre-eminence of internal processes and acknowledges the role of outside influences. A study of the debates over the drafting of the 1946 constitution in Brazil necessarily foregrounds clashing domestic positions. In contrast, on a larger canvas, the influence of external actors and the linkages between domestic voices and their international sources of support would provide a more cosmopolitan perspective. But Madison’s sharpened focus does underscore the importance of this national political dialogue and serves to demonstrate the salience and diversity of the issues in contention: parliamentary or presidential rule; unicameralism or a federal senate; individual rights or social justice; land reform or the inviolability of property; corporatism or free trade unions; votes for illiterates and aboriginals, or only for socialized citizens? What scope for a state of siege, or the banning of political parties? As events were soon to confirm, these were not mere theoretical discussions. Very soon, the raw clash of contending forces would test some of these alternatives to destruction, and others remain in contention to this day.

Madison’s study draws our attention to competing conceptions of democracy already emerging in previous decades and alternatives that have remained relevant ever since. Behind such doctrinal debates stood all too real political interests and less than pure political actors. Neither US Ambassador to Brazil (1945–46), Adolph A. Berle, nor presidents Dutra or Vargas; nor the leader of the right-wing National Democratic Union (UDN) Carlos Lacerda, or the Communist military officer Luís Carlos Prestes, can be viewed as models of democratic probity. Still, in the interactions between them (and many less celebrated but equally flawed actors), space was created for a variety of democratizing experiments. Some of these projects were more promising and coherent than others. Still, all were partial and incomplete, and it is impressive that despite this, the actual outcomes were relatively effective and durable, at least until the Cuban Revolution brought Cold War intransigence to the boil in the early 1960s.

Brazil merits particular attention as a laboratory for competing Latin American conceptions of democracy in the post-war period, but this case is by no means exceptional. Similar controversies and lingering divergences can be traced throughout the whole subcontinent. Even today – as Chileans try to rewrite their constitution, the Peruvian congress ousts successive presidents, or the Mexican government presses ahead with a political reform despite Supreme Court rulings – many foundational issues of democratic governance remain unsettled across the Western hemisphere.

Conclusion

This chapter has queried the characterization of Latin America’s post-1945 political struggles as part of a worldwide “second wave” (a number that only makes sense if we accept the odd claim that 1989 was the “third” such wave) of a supposedly persistent and recurrent process of global democratization. That summary label provides a convenient shorthand and captures some genuinely analogous features of the western hemisphere regime changes of the period. Yet the associated costs are considerable. While a capsule metaphor does streamline an analysis, it tends to screen out background information, including considerations that enrich the understanding of complex and contested historical processes. Disparate events can thereby be funnelled into a deceptively simple pre-packaged and under-theorized narrative framework. This approach carries the following risks: false equivalence of cases; over-confident attribution of causal connectivity; under-estimation of diverse longer run patterns of contestation; and normative pre-judgement (both positive and negative) of actors’ understandings, intentions, and possibilities.

False equivalence

The issue of false equivalences can be explored by comparing the “second” global wave of 1945 with the “third” wave that is supposed to have started in the mid-seventies and culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Whereas a vast and intense collective effort by the Allies defeated the Axis powers from without, the fall of the Soviet bloc was primarily generated from within, with much more gradual and half-hearted prompting from without. Indeed, it caught the victors by surprise, and disoriented their expectations and alliances. China had just suppressed democracy as the USSR imploded; a united Germany would now displace France and Britain in EU leadership; apartheid was finished; and multiple other unanticipated effects would cascade from the 1989 upheaval. 1945 offered few parallels to guide world leaders half a century later, and the impact on democratic possibilities in large world regions was extremely uneven.

Overconfident causal claims

In these two cases, overconfident causal claims distorted perceptions both when these trigger events took place and retrospectively. For example, the second and third-wave classification implies that it was US-led triumphs in 1945 and 1989 that most decisively delivered the ensuing surges of democratization. Yet it was in the 1960s that the western hemisphere recorded its greatest single increment in democratic regimes – when 10 former colonies in the Caribbean gained their sovereignty and (with only occasional setbacks) established electorally competitive regimes. Globally, decolonization has also contributed to analogous regime changes in major settings such as India, Malaysia, and Nigeria, all of which are only indirectly traceable to Huntington’s waves. Suppose the defeat of Nazism was the decisive cause of democratization in South America. Why did leading Nazis such as Klaus Barbie, the “butcher of Lyon,” not only escape but continue to enjoy power and immunity there for another quarter century? Why were Spanish Republican exiles so often persecuted while pro-Franco clergy populated the churches? It is beyond doubt that movements favouring many aspects of democracy flourished in the sub-continent. Still, for each that is traceable to the Allied victory of 1945, another of equal weight was directed against the “home of democracy,” with hostility directed at the United Fruit Company, US Navy bases in Cuba, Panama, and Puerto Rico⁴ or at Vice-President Nixon’s disastrous 1958 tour of the region.

Underestimating long-term patterns

As illustrated earlier here, many fragmentary and local democratizing initiatives were underway well before 1945, and the “cresting of the second wave” produced uneven effects, for instance, often curbing university autonomy and labour activism while perhaps reinforcing media pluralism. Brazilian democracy may have advanced as a result of the Allied Victory, but in Argentina and Chile previously promising endeavours were arguably set back. Such well-known core aspects of democratic construction as suffrage extensions, civilian control over the military, land reform, and political decentralization were similarly subject to a diversity of counter currents and have remained central features of political contestation to the present day.

Misinterpreting actors

Finally, therefore, the normative charge of the wave metaphor colours our understanding of the dynamics at play in the region in the 1940s. Some partisan labelling of the players in contention has been forgotten in the light of subsequent developments (“Nazi” Perón, “free world” Batista, “communist” Betancourt). Just as often retrospective judgments project back simplified and implausible characterizations of actors, such as Arbenz, Bosch (presented as communist stooges); Figueres (re-imagined as a principled democrat); likewise, Gaitán, Haya de la Torre, Lacerda, or Paz Estenssoro.⁵ All these were complex and cross-pressured figures whose actual predicaments and intentions essentially became obscured and retrospectively mythologized.

Normative labelling and interpretative judgments are core features of most social explanations, in contrast to the neutrality and disinterestedness that characterize much work in the physical sciences. Whereas wave theory is dispassionate, the wave metaphor in democratization studies is inherently perspectival and prone to distortion and manipulation. By identifying the main sources of potential distortion, it is possible to improve the objectivity of such exercises in classification. However, to control the biases inherent in this metaphorical exercise, it may be better to do without the maritime metaphor altogether and substitute narrower language that is more explicit about its built-in assumptions. “Temporal and spatial clusters of democratic experimentation” may be a less catchy phrase, but it is also less prone to misinterpretation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Compare Whitehead (2015), which identifies the temporary suspension and subsequent reimposition of a climate of fear and repression as the common denominator linking otherwise diverse national experiences.

2. Two contributions that demonstrate the potential payoff of this approach are Ruíz Jiménez (1998), and Knudson (1986).

3. An alternative view is offered by Clark: “Neither the great French Revolution of 1789, nor the July Revolution of 1830, nor the Paris Commune of 1870, nor the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 sparked a comparable transcontinental cascade. 1989 looks like a better comparator, but there is still controversy as to whether these uprisings can be characterized as ‘revolutions’”(Clark 2023, 1). Obviously 1945 is not included in this listing. The only time Clark refers to a “second wave” is when he contrasts the upheavals of 1849 and 1850 with those of 1848 (p. 745).

4. But compare Herman (2022) which covers Brazil, Cuba and Panama, highlighting the adaptability and social responsiveness of many US military base builders.

5. Elsewhere, I detail the extreme and spectacularly erratic labelling of the leaders of Bolivia’s 1952 National Revolution, originating in part from a deliberate British wartime forgery that was never subsequently retracted (Whitehead 1992, 121).