Military Motivations in the Seizure of Power

One of the most characteristic features of political processes in Latin America is the military seizure of power. The phenomenon is extremely complex and a complete understanding of it, if that is ever reached, will have to take into account a variety of causal factors operating over different periods of time, and interacting in various ways. Where a problem is this complex, one is well advised to approach it through a variety of methods, and this has indeed occurred. Some of the standard methods are: 1. To contrast Latin American experience as a whole with that of other areas-the United States, or Western Europe, or Africa-in order to isolate putative causal factors present in Latin American history and tradition but not found elsewhere; 2. To contrast the experience of different Latin American countries, identifying those more prone to military assumptions of power and trying to determine what socioeconomic or other variables correlate with a high propensity to military coups; 3. To examine changes over time in the incidence of coups, in the history of all of the Latin American countries, of a single country, or of a limited group of them, to try to discover the changes in other dimensions associated with changes in the relative frequency of coups; 4. To examine the motives of military officers who stage coups, either as stated by them or as imputed to them by knowledgeable observers.