Dictatorships and political parties in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Annotations for a comparative history

Abstract

Within the framework of the dictatorial processes that took place in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay in the sixties and seventies, this article compares the behavior of political parties, pointing out the specificities of each specific case. The crisis in Latin America is reviewed in a generic way and the peculiarities of the institutional ruptures of the studied period are pointed out, with the consequent protagonism assumed by the armed forces in their new function of partial disruption of the system and construction of new modes of articulation.
The study of the role of the parties during the process is ordered by analytical cuts that delimit intradictatorial periods: the coup, the military interregnum and the transition. The characteristics of the party system are illustrated for each period and each national context, as well as the particularities of its relationship with the other actors. Thus, in the final comparative summary, the diversity in terms of the location (central or not) of the political parties in the system, the degree of withdrawal or mobilization and the measure of partisan participation in the transition in the three countries becomes clear. . From this, the author raises some questions that point to new lines of research.