Factors Influencing the Occurrence of Military Coups D'Etat in Latin America

Table 1 shows a marked difference between the countries, the number ranging from Ecuador's 13 coups to Uruguay's zero. This immediately suggests the first question to be discussed in the course of this article, viz. what factors account for this variation between countries? Or, more specifically, is the frequency in some way related to certain background variables describing these countries? Another logical question would be whether there are some recurrent situations in which military coups show a particularly high frequency. One obvious situation is election periods, here taken to mean a period stretching from 6 months before to 6 months after a presidential election. There may be other characteristics of the situation, for instance economic fluctuations: we may speak about 'improvement years' and deterioration years'3 and see which economic conditions seem particularly favourable to the occurrence of coups. These and other factors will be discussed later in this paper. Much emphasis will be placed on the historical development: that is, we will look at the changes in relative frequencies for the values on a number of variables over the years. Table 2 gives the percentages of the 105 coups occurring in an early period, an intermediate period, and a recent period, respectively.