colonialism, the newly constituted governments of virtually every Latin American country moved toward extreme centralization, creating in the process, a dual elite composed of wealthy and politically powerful individuals and a strong military.
To maintain the power thus acquired, the authoritarian and at times totalitarian national governments demonstrated that they were more than willing to engage in abuses of human rights that ranged from suspension of free speech to imprisonment without trial to torture and to wholesale executions of dissidents (Mecham, 1965). These behaviors appear to have been typical not only of conservative, rightist, militarist regimes, but also to have been employed by leftist, socialist or populist regimes as well.
In the view of Guillermo A. OÆDonnell (1973), enormous gaps between the powerful and affluent elites and the great masses of workers and the poor developed alongside efforts to achieve economic and societal modernization in the post-colonial era.
The emergence of new social units, such as a middle class, tended to bolster the trend toward bureaucratic regimes and authoritarian centralized governments. Dictatorships supported by military loyalists in Argentina, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Paraguay, and Uruguay became the order of the day.
OÆDonnell (1973) believes that economic development, often facilitated by multinational firms headquartered in the industrialized West or by unilateral grants-in-aid from hegemonic powers such as the United States and the former Soviet Union, were used not necessarily to secure widespread economic advancement, but rather to support the control of rightist or leftist governments.
In the process of moving from a colonial to a post-
colonial governmental structure, societal change and industrial relations throughout South America exerted a profound impact upon the lives of the peons, peasants, and the poor. Arturo S. Bronstein (1995) c...