Guest lecture | 1973: A Critical Year in Latin America

The Centre for Democratic Politics is delighted to be hosting a guest lecture from Professor Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta on the critical year of 1973 in the context of Latin America.

In this guest lecture, Prof. Rodrigo Patto Sá Motta offers an assessment of the decisive year of 1973 in the context of Latin America by exploring the commonalities and particularities among different southern cone military dictatorships. 1973 is most often associated with the military coup of Chile and the period of dictatorship and bloodshed that followed. However, it was also a decisive year in the gradual establishment of dictatorship in Uruguay as Parliament was disbanded and the military expanded its tutelage over the government. As for the largest country in South America, Brazil, whose 1964 coup inaugurated the region’s cycle of military dictatorships, the year of 1973 intensified the country’s role as a model and stimulus for neighbouring countries. We now know, for example, that the Brazilian military supported their Chilean counterparts in overthrowing Salvador Allende’s government and pressured the Uruguayan government to prevent the local Left from rising to power. Paradoxically, in 1973, the Brazilian dictatorship was in the process of planning its slow and contentious return to democracy, leading to General Ernesto Geisel assumption of power the following year. In Argentina, the dictatorship established in 1966 was coming to a close with the 1973 elections that brought the Peronists back to power. This began a democratic interregnum that ended with yet another military coup, in March 1976, which would take political violence to previously unthinkable levels.

Taking 1973 as a landmark, this guest lecture analyses the objectives and interests that led certain social groups to support the dictatorships and their tools of repression, as well as the impact these authoritarian regimes had on regional and global history. Now that fifty years have passed, can we consider that democracy in the region is durable? Have the structural and contextual elements that gave rise to the authoritarian wave of the 1960s-70s now been overcome?

This event is hosted by the Centre for Democratic Politics, University of Leeds, as part of the Thinking Inside the Box: 1973 Festival. Free tickets are available here.