What We Don't Know About the Coups: Observations on Recent South American Politics

In the wake of the Latin American military coups of the 1960s and 1970s, an extensive and impressive body of literature explored the origins and development of these new military regimes. This paper examines some of the high points of this literature: Huntington's and Nun's proposals of the military as the agent of the modernizing middle classes, Skidmore's focus on the inadequacy of one precoup party system, and O'Donnell's version of the thesis of a crisis in peripheral capitalist industrialization. While each proposal has shed light on some aspects of these regimes, all of them raise questions about the thinking of the central actors in military politics that currently dominant lines of empirical research are unlikely to resolve.