Chapter 5 shows how the development of strong parties and professional militaries contributed to the emergence of enduring democracies in Chile and Uruguay. Both countries developed strong parties during the late nineteenth century thanks in part to the geographic concentration of the population and the existence of relatively balanced cleavages. During the nineteenth century, these parties at times sought power via armed revolts, but once the military professionalized, the opposition began to focus exclusively on the electoral route to power. This occurred in the late nineteenth century in Chile, but not until the early twentieth century in Uruguay. In both countries, opposition parties pushed for democratic reforms to enfranchise their supporters and level the electoral playing field. It was not until the ruling party split, however, that the opposition managed to enact major reforms, which occurred in Chile in 1890 and Uruguay in 1917. In both countries, strong opposition parties played a central role not only in the enactment of the reforms but also in their enforcement.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, numerous groups in Uruguay coalesced to oppose fascism. This chapter examines the antifascist efforts organized by ethnic societies, labor unions, women’s groups, Afro-Uruguayans, students, intellectuals, and artists, among others. The emergent antifascist movements in Uruguay served as nodes in the broader transnational struggle for democracy and against totalitarianism. While some Uruguayans traveled to Spain to directly take part in the Spanish Civil War, others sought to marshal support at home to combat the influence of European fascism. The ideological struggles in Europe were also pressing at home, as President Gabriel Terra initiated a dictatorship in the 1930s that revealed his supporters’ fascist leanings. Likewise, an engrained sense of national exceptionalism tied to Uruguay’s decades-long democratic tradition, augmented the need to resist Terra’s dictatorship (1933–38) and later to repudiate any remnants of its legacy.

On June 27, 1973, Juan María Bordaberry, the democratically elected president of Uruguay, dissolved the general assembly and remained in office, sharing executive power with the military command. Uruguayans mention this date when asked when was the last coup d’état in their country. However, political and social actors have long disagreed over the exact meaning of this event and few would now reject that it was just one, albeit final and dramatic, step in a relatively long path toward authoritarianism. Things were different after that date in terms of state institutions as well as freedoms and rights for the citizenry, but many analysts have shown that most of these changes were in the making since at least 1968, when Jorge Pacheco Areco took power and governed under repressive measures of exception. A more recent body of literature has gone further back in time to show the importance of previous steps that aligned national politics with the polarized order of the Cold War. This chapter aims at offering a plausible narrative of what happened in the fifteen years before the date of the coup, combining basic historical facts with the changing interpretations that placed and displaced meaning and importance among them.

If one is looking for the mechanism connecting war to state formation in Latin America, the obvious place to start is the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), the single most deadly war in the history of the region. This chapter provides the most detailed discussion of this case in the state formation literature and a narrative covering state formation in the River Plate Basin (i.e., Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). I discuss how earlier, lower intensity wars affected the balance between central and peripheral elites and take a brief detour to cover the effect of the Siege of Montevideo on Uruguayan politics, potentially explaining the current Uruguayan exceptionalism in terms of its state capacity levels. I then illustrate how preparation for war led to incipient state formation amidst polarization in all contenders of the Paraguayan War and discuss the war itself, illustrating how the result of contingent battles affected the domestic fate of the state formation. Finally, I discuss how war transformed political parties and the military, two key institutions, setting the basis for long term state capacity growth in the allies, and its decline in Paraguay.

This chapter considers the repatriation of French women and girls in the midst of the moral panic of trafficking. Advocates for repatriation justified this protocol with reference to regulatory aims: protecting the vulnerable from exploitation, guarding borders against undesirables, and managing the sexual order of nations. International conventions and French national law designated the consulate as the body responsible for returning trafficking victims to France; by authorizing or denying repatriation, the consul functioned as a powerful agent of migration control. Consuls focused their efforts on trafficking victims while placing consenting prostitutes in a category apart, although in practice, this line was not so easy to draw. Vulnerability did not always track neatly with youthfulness, passivity, or moral purity. In addition, vulnerability occurred in a wide range of exploitative labor arrangements, including but not limited to prostitution.

This chapter turns to the comparison of cases. By analyzing the discontented cases, a clear pattern emerges. The positive cases share few characteristics save one: democratic discontent that arose when sharp economic contractions intensified the imperfections and contradictions of the political status quo. This argument is made using paired comparisons of the positive and negative cases (Canada with the USA/UK, Portugal with Spain, Uruguay with Brazil/Chile) to evaluate competing explanations. The second section of the chapter analyzes how discontent was avoided during the Great Recession by looking for shared features of the three negative cases. It finds that escaping the initial pain of a crisis was not a necessary condition for avoiding discontent. Instead, the key to maintaining democratic legitimacy lay in the political response to the crises, and in the adaptability and health of left-wing parties. In all three negative cases, center-left parties recognized crises as indictments of neoliberalism, rejected its calls for austerity. By responding to popular demands for help in difficult times, these parties deprived cultural conflicts of the oxygen needed for them to rage and avoided major upsurges of discontent.

This chapter examines Uruguay’s radical shift from an almost complete denial of its Afro-Uruguayan population to official state recognition. While Uruguay follows a larger Latin American movement for multiculturalism that began in the late twentieth century, Uruguay is unique in the specific path it took to overcome the invisibility of its black population, a change critically tied to the military government’s treatment of Afro-Uruguayans from 1973–1985. This chapter argues that the push for legal visibility occurred as a result of the twin pressures of Afro-Uruguayan mobilization in the aftermath of the dictatorship, combined with a larger global shift towards support for state-sponsored ethnoracial recognition. Using interviews and sources from Uruguayan and international archives, it locates the importance of official recognition in the context of building a powerful civil rights movement that has had tangible policy outcomes, such as inclusion in the census and an affirmative action law.

This chapter explains the purpose of the volume: to provide English-speaking readers with access to the richest and most concentrated venue for Black voices in Latin American history.It offers a brief overview of the evolution of the Black press in the context of racial formation and national politics in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Cuba. It explores the factors that led to the formation of a Black press in these locations, but not elsewhere in Latin America, situating the Black press as one very particular formation of Black intellectual and textual production in a broader spectrum.The writers and editors who produced the Black press are briefly introduced as is the “anatomy” of these publications – typical content, formats, and design elements.The key themes and organization of the book are introduced, as are some questions of terminology.

Chapter 7 focuses on political parties as agents of representation that channel citizen interests and values into the policy-making process in contemporary Latin America. It illustrates the flaws of democracy without representative parties through a discussion of Peru, and shows that many Latin American democracies have experienced crises of representation because citizens see many party leaders as cut off from common citizens. To explain the state of parties, it argues that crises of representation persist when neoliberalism is treated as inevitable. It also maintains, through an analysis of parties in Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay, that parties become agents of representation due to the work of skillful political leaders, committed activists, and vigorous social movements. It also highlights that a weak state undermines party building because it limits the possibility that elected officials can deliver public goods and engender popular support. It concludes that, although democracy has become the norm in Latin America, few democracies have parties that act as agents of representation, and that this lack of a deep, substantive sense of representation is a key problem of democracy.