In sum, there is no variation among these regimes in their willingness to delegate economic and other policies to talented civilian ministers. As a set, they differed from other authoritarian regimes of the 1970s, such as Peru under military rule, which appointed only military officers to cabinet posts. There are some differences, however, in the willingness to work closely with leading industrialists. The authoritarian regimes in Chile and Argentina 1976 were markedly less supportive of the development of manufacturing. And conflicts over some issues emerged in the 1970s and 1980s in Mexico between business and the state.
The authoritarian regimes under study differed in their willingness to retain a parliament and lawful political parties. The Argentine and Chilean dictatorships disbanded Congress and proscribed political parties for
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nearly all of their duration, necessarily relying on secret police and brute repression to cope with the opposition and obtain pertinent political information. They were sophisticated dictatorships in some economic policies but rather primitive in their politics.
The Mexican single-party regime, in contrast, never dispensed with its Congress during its decades in power and, by definition, it featured a ruling party. The party was organized into worker, peasant, and “popular”
(catch-all) sectors; labor and peasant union leaders and many middle-class groups were thus linked directly to the ruling party. Nominations of candidates for the presidency remained the informal but effective prerogative of the incumbent president until the 2000 election. Nominations for other ruling party posts were negotiated within narrow ruling circles to ensure control from the top and party discipline. The main long-term opposition party, the National Action Party (PAN), was founded in 1939 and was never banned. It was cheated from many subnational electoral victories during its history; it won the presidency for the first time only in 2000. The regime tolerated other small parties but these, unlike the PAN, were often co-opted. The ruling party won elections by using legal and illegal means, including fraud. Outgoing President Cárdenas set the example in the 1940
presidential election, ensuring the election of his chosen successor over a strong opposition candidate.
Posts in Mexico’s Congress rewarded politicians from various regions and from the party’s various sectors to sustain the broad ruling coalition; membership in the Congress “nationalized” regional and sectoral politicians. The no-immediate-reelection rule enabled many politicians to rotate as members of Congress. The Congress also gave the opposition voice without power. In the early 1960s, the constitution was amended to ensure some opposition party representation in the Chamber of Deputies elected from party lists. In 1977, the constitution was amended again to ensure that there would be no fewer than 100 opposition deputies in the 400-member chamber. A decade later, as part of the start of the political transition, the opposition was guaranteed 200 seats in a 500-member chamber.
Until the 1988 elections, Congress posed no serious challenge to the president’s powers; between 1988 and 1997, the president needed support from the PAN when he wished to amend the constitution. In short, the choice of consultative, partisan, and legislative institutional strategies gave the Mexican authoritarian regime “safe” instruments with which to reward supporters, discipline members, and allow the opposition to vent its grievances without resorting to violence or harming policies. It was a brilliant political strategy for authoritarian rule.
The Brazilian military government stumbled onto a similar scheme. Its
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approach proved to be less successful than in Mexico but rather more so than in Argentina and Chile. As already noted, after the 1964 coup the Brazilian military purged the Congress, weakened it institutionally, and in 1965 disbanded the preexisting political parties. But the toothless Congress continued, and new political parties were founded. Politicians were herded into an official party, the National Renewal Alliance (ARENA), or the tolerated opposition, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the opposition held about one-third of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, a much higher proportion than in Mexico before the start of its democratic transition.24 The Congress and the tolerated opposition party voiced discontent without impairing executive policies. The government employed cooptation strategies and patronage to woo selected opposition members and keep ARENA party members of Congress and subnational politicians in line.
This strategy served the government well even in the 1982 legislative elections, the last held under dictatorship. ARENA won 49 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies; by that point, the government had authorized the creation of other parties so ARENA remained the largest party. And ARENA held two-thirds of the Senate seats.25 ARENA was never as central to the Brazilian military regime, however, as the PRI was in Mexico. The Brazilian executive was beholden to the top military officer corps and independent from ARENA, whereas in Mexico the president was a successful PRI politician.
The South Korean experience was superior to Mexico’s and Brazil’s in the 1960s but inferior in the 1970s. Mexican and Brazilian authoritarians relied increasingly upon political strategies for governing. The South Korean sequence was the opposite, that is, there was decreasing use of political strategies from the 1960s to the 1970s. South Korea moved away from subtle authoritarian rule (Brazil, Mexico) toward the more primitive exercise of power (Argentina, Chile).
The Park regime began with the construction of the Democratic Republican Party (DRP) and the toleration of a significant opposition. In 1963, Park won the presidency with 42.6 percent of the vote, just 1.5 percentage points ahead of opposition candidate Yun Po-Sôn. In 1967, Park widened his margin of victory to 10 percentage points over Yun. In 1971, Park also won comfortably, although his margin of victory narrowed slightly. During these years, the National Assembly included substantial opposition representation and, especially between 1963 and 1967, noteworthy opportunities for individual Assembly members to propose bills. The Assembly also typically modified about half of all executive bills. Yet as the years passed, the political space shrank for Assembly member initiatives or for
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DRP-led amendments of executive bills. In contrast to ARENA in Brazil and the PRI in Mexico, the DRP steadily atrophied as time wore on.26
Some blame for the weakness of the South Korean opposition rests with the opposition itself and some with government efforts to weaken it. In the 1963 legislative elections the combined opposition parties won half the votes while the government won only one-third (this did not happen at all during the first half of the Brazilian authoritarian regime, and it happened only as part of the end of the Mexican authoritarian regime), but the single-member plurality district electoral law, and the division of the opposition into four major parties, left the government with 63 percent of the seats. In 1963, the South Korean opposition would have benefited from being forced into a single party like Brazil’s MDB. By the 1967 election, excellent economic growth performance and resort to election rigging gave the DRP a majority of the votes and nearly three-quarters of the seats. In the 1971 legislative election, the distribution of seats resembled the distribution of votes more closely because government and opposition parties had become regionally concentrated and thus able to win single-member district seats relatively proportionate to their national share of the votes (the DRP, nonetheless, still won more seats than its share of the national vote). With nearly 45 percent of the seats, the opposition could block constitutional amendments.27
Compare the Park regime’s response to the 1971 parliamentary elections with the Brazilian dictatorship’s response to the 1974 parliamentary elections. In Brazil, the opposition MDB won sixteen out of twenty-two senators and nearly doubled its share of the popular vote in the Chamber of Deputies, reaching almost 38 percent of the votes. In anticipation of the next elections, Brazil’s military government a
mended the constitution, ar-rogating to itself the power to appoint one-third of the Senate and gerry-mandering the Chamber of Deputies to increase the representation of the rural areas, where it was stronger. Soon thereafter, however, the government also relaxed its political party law, permitting various parties to organize, and it adopted a much more tolerant attitude toward labor union strikes.28 The government began to loosen the historical state-corporatist control over labor unions, enabling independent labor unions to organize.
The government preferred that labor protest focus on business firms, not on the state. To cope with the more complex political situation, the government increased its reliance on the official ARENA party. ARENA incorporated most of the appointed senators. The net result retained sufficient space for the opposition and sufficient power for the government. The government preferred to rely on political instruments instead of brute repression. A sharper, more destabilizing political crisis was avoided. Higher
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levels of repression were unnecessary and the cost of coercion was reduced. Bolívar Lamounier summarized the regime’s strategy well in comparative perspective: “Between the impossibility of a lasting Mexicanization, and more dictatorial immobilism, General Geisel [the fourth consecutive military president in Brazil] opted for a third road, which was gradual and secure decompression.”29
The Park regime’s response to the April and May 1971 election challenges was less effective in maintaining an authoritarian regime that relied on the consent of the governed or at least their toleration, with low resort to repression. Park could not Mexicanize and would not even attempt to Brazilianize South Korea’s political system. Along with other factors, the 1971 elections led Park to install the yushin regime the next year. Under the yushin constitution, Park could control the appointment of one-third of the National Assembly members. Because South Korea’s parliament was unicameral, this was a much greater proportionate power of appointment than the Brazilian authoritarians would obtain a few years later. In contrast to the rising role of ARENA in Brazil, Park chose to rely less on the DRP because he was assured of support from his appointees. The electoral law and the government’s manipulation of the political process greatly weakened the opposition parties as well. The yushin regime also imposed tougher controls over Korean labor unions. Park relied increasingly on the Korea Central Intelligence Agency and other repressive forces to provide him with information to put down the opposition.30
The installation of the yushin regime, as Hyug Baeg Im indicates in Chapter 8, was directly related to the regime’s founding flaw—a flaw that authoritarians had avoided in Brazil and Mexico. Park insisted on remaining in power, forcing an amendment of the constitution to enable him to run for a third reelection in 1971 against the opposition of members of his own coalition, and employing this succession crisis as a tool to enable the subsequent construction of the yushin regime. The authoritarian regimes in Brazil and Mexico were spared these succession troubles because they had arranged for the rotation of presidential power within the authoritarian regime.
In conclusion, Mexican authoritarians institutionalized means for consultation and thus fashioned policies that gathered support. Their choice of means also made it easy to obtain political information about opponents. The ruling PRI managed the choice of incumbents at election time with relative ease. The Brazilian dictatorship was less capable, but it also employed various consultative mechanisms, retained a parliament, permitted a strong lawful opposition and, for most of its duration, preferred to co-opt rather than to repress. These two authoritarian regimes were pre-
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pared to repress, of course, and at times did so. One should not confuse an
“intelligent dictator” with a democrat.
The means for stable and politically successful authoritarian rule, with low levels of repression, created in Mexico and to some extent in Brazil, were for the most part absent in Argentina (especially in the late 1970s) and in Chile. The remarkable South Korean feat is that its ruler exchanged the more politically effective means of the 1960s for the less politically effective means of the 1970s.31
The previous choices about means for rule making, information gathering, and representation had consequences for the enforcement of compliance. The fewer the channels for peaceful expression of dissent are, the greater the likelihood of protest and repression is. The authoritarian regimes in Argentina (especially 1976), Chile, and South Korea under yushin were highly repressive. Torture became an administrative practice, large numbers of political prisoners were held, and labor union protest was dealt with harshly. In contrast, levels of political imprisonment were much lower in authoritarian Brazil. Both torture and political imprisonment were lower still in authoritarian Mexico.32
The Labor Question
Mexican authoritarians relied on two sets of instruments to control organized labor. One set included state controls on worker participation, selective repression of labor opposition movements, and cooptation of labor leaders; this set made the regime authoritarian. But the long-term stability of authoritarian rule in Mexico also rested on the alliance forged between the 1920s and the 1940s that linked national political elites to key elements of organized labor. Despite at times contradictory policies, the national political elite valued this alliance at least until the mid-1990s and supported its labor union allies in return for their backing the regime.33 Few strikes got “out of control” during the long decades of PRI rule; repression was limited even at those times. This fact does not excuse the regime’s authoritarian practices, but it makes clear their political effectiveness.
The Brazilian military government installed in 1964 inherited the labor code first elaborated in 1943, which intended unions to collaborate with the government to promote social peace. It gave the Labor Ministry broad powers over the unions, including the capacity to intervene in union elections and replace union leaders. Strikes were extremely rare. General nationwide labor confederations were prohibited. This scheme for labor control came to be known as state corporatism.34 In 1964, the government
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used this labor code to the hilt to get rid of union leaders it disliked and to crush union power.
Brazil’s economic “miracle” transformed the social and economic basis for labor unions. From 1960 to 1980, the number of people employed in secondary economic activities nearly quadrupled. They were geographically concentrated. In the 1970s, about half of all secondary-sector employment was located in the state of São Paulo, making it easier for labor activists to organize unions. Led by metalworkers, in 1978 a wave of union strikes swept over the manufacturing sector, especially in São Paulo.
This labor upsurge led to the foundation of the Workers’ Party (PT) in 1979, made possible by the regime’s changes in the electoral law, permitting the creation of new parties, and in labor laws to permit wage increases and the emergence of interunion organizations.35 There was no
“Cordobazo” in Brazil in 1978, because the dictatorship—led by President General Ernesto Geisel—knew how to adjust. There was also less need for brute repression.
The political ineptitude of the Argentine regimes stands out in contrast.
Mention has been made of the “Cordobazo” labor union and other protests in May 1969 that led eventually to the unraveling of the Argentine authoritarian regime founded in 1966. The Onganía regime had sought to subordinate, not to destroy, organized labor; the latter thus remained strong enough to provide eventually the major impetus for the regime’s termination. Nevertheless, this military regime generally preferred to co-opt than to repress the labor unions. In 1976, the Videla dictatorship believed it had to avoid that “mistake.” In addition to the thousands of people murdered by the security forces, the Videla government attacked the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) to abolish “political unionism,” destroying the CGT’s capacity to coordinate hundreds of lab
or unions and drastically curtailing their economic power. Labor unions suffered much more from this second authoritarian regime, but in the 1980s they reemerged nearly as strong as ever to reclaim their power after this dictatorship collapsed in 1983. Argentine organized labor’s political and economic militancy remained vibrant during the 1980s.36
The Chilean authoritarian regime was extremely hostile to the labor movement. Its economic and social policies led to a drop in real wages, increased unemployment, heightened repression, and severe limitations on the capacity of unions to represent their members. The immediate postcoup repression of labor was at least as severe as in Argentina. Yet in Chile, government authorities innovated a more successful labor policy; labor minister José Piñera was its architect. His “Labor Plan” greatly curtailed the ability of organized labor political networks to affect elections of
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any kind, but it created a space for labor unions at the plant level. The Labor Plan markedly weakened the areas eligible for collective bargaining, yet at the same time such bargaining remained a tool available for unions.
Although it became very difficult to call a strike legally, strikes were not banned. The outcome permitted a limited role for labor unions. In the 1980s, while the unions were key actors in the political opposition to the dictatorship, they were never powerful enough to overthrow it or to prevent the accomplishment of its economic objectives.37 The Chilean labor movement had been one of Latin America’s most powerful before the 1973 coup, certainly far more so than South Korea’s in either 1961 or 1972. The Chilean dictatorship, unlike Argentina’s, dealt with its labor unions harshly but not stupidly.
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