THE RESULTS OF THE BRAZILIAN ELECTIONS OF 15 NOVEMBER 1982 made irreversible the trend towards abertura in the country with the longest experience of technocratic development in the Third world.

Regarded as an almost impossible achievement by political analysts, these elections became a model of a genuine ‘decompression from the top’. The system neither lost its grip during the process nor did it back down from its purpose of an almost full return to direct elections for the executive in the Brazilian Federation, making ample use of the president's involvement in the contest.

ON 15 NOVEMBER 1982, BRAZIL HELD GENERAL ELECTIONS. Despite stiff electoral rules, they were the first conducted in a climate of freedom since 1964, when the military overthrew the civilian Goulart government, which had been struck by instability and paralysis. In December, the authorities requested several very large new loans and ‘roll-overs’ from the IMF and the private financial community, in an attempt to assure the continuing service of the country's massive foreign debt. The two events epitomize underlying processes that had been evolving for several years: political liberalization and adjustment to economic crisis.

SINCE 1974, A PROCESS OF POLITICAL ‘OPENING’ HAS BEEN taking place in Brazil. But it was only after 1978, when the amnesty law was passed and exiles be an to return, that a majority of observers and academic analysts convinced them-selves that that process was real. The Brazilian regime can still be described as military-based and authoritarian, but now the so-called abertura has become meaningful enough to direct our attention to a different set of questions: why did such changes take place, contrary to most predictions, journalistic as well as academic, of the late 1960s and early 1970s? Why have elections pla ed such a decisive role in them, again contrary to most predictions? Are the fruits picked in this example of redemocratization really ripe to be enjoyed? Can the other countries subject to military-authoritarian rule in the Southern Cone equally aspire to them – that is , to orderly but yet significant steps toward an eventual demise of their authoritarian systems?

IN 1964 THE BRAZILIAN POLITICAL SYSTEM UNDERWENT A basic change. The populist republic (1946–64), which had paved the way for both a formal and an informal extension of political and economic franchises, after the success of Kubitschek's administration (1956–61) and Quadros's resignation (1961), collapsed as a result of decisional paralysis. The economic challen e of accumulation and the political challenge of social justice led, in the early 1960s during the Goulart administration, both to a fragmentation of power and to radicalization. The more demands multiplied, the more the government hesitated, feeding the anxiety of different political grou s in society. The result was a growing distrust of the politicafsystem. Distrust in turn not only prevented a coalition in support of a consistent governmental programme but also brought about an intensification of conflictual demands. This self-sustaining mechanism of decisional paralysis was interrupted by the emergence of what has been called by Juan Linz and Guuermo O'Donnell ‘a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime’.

THE ELECTIONS IN ARGENTINA HAVE BEEN A SURPRISE TO everybody. The results, contrasted with those of 1973, were the following:

THE RECENT VICTORY OF RAUL ALFONSÍN AND THE RADICAL Party in Argentina marks the end of forty years during which the Peronists were, overtly or covertly, the major factor in Argentine politics. It also sounds the death-knell of attempts to find a trans-class solution to the problem of political legitimacy in Argentina. It may not be inappropriate, then, to look back on the most sustained attempt to establish this legitimacy via an ideology of class collaboration: the ideology of Peronism.

THE ISSUE OF CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS PRESENTS THE new Argentine government with several problems. One is the structuring of government, that is general staff relations. Moreover the new authorities must take a position in the short to medium term over the question of responsibility for the ‘dirty war’, the plundering of the public purse by the officer corps between 1976 and 1982 and the defeat in the war with Britain. And in the longer term they must confront the wider issue of how to both ‘civilianize’ the armed forces and ‘demilitarize’ civil society.

THE FOREIGN ADVENTURISM OF THE ARGENTINE MILITARY may have made a few minds more cautious about automatically welcoming the advent of any other future military regime. This point was made more than a decade ago by Stepan in his seminal work on the military in Brazil; what he said then could have been said of most military regimes anywhere:

Whatever the future outcome, it is clear that the attraction of military rule – its presumed stability, unity, and ftvity of purpose – has been largely illusory. Even more importantly, the difficulties encountered by the highly professional army of Brazil, with its technocratic civilian allies, illustrate that there can be no apolitical solution to the problems of political development.

TO THE AVERAGE EUROPEAN CONCERNED WITH, OR SIMPLY curious about, international politics and the Third World predicament, Latin America is a glaring compound of violent Machtpolitik, rampant demography and collective soul-searching. Uneasily torn between Western loyalties and the dismal realities of underdevelopment, the huge continent from Rio Bravo to Patagonia keeps featuring as the unhappy part of America – indeed, of the whole West (for Latin America, unlike Africa, is not just a lost possession of the West – rather, it is a Western projection, for all the obvious significance of its non-Western ethnic and cultural components).

THE INSTABILITY OF MOST LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES derives to a large extent from the difficulty of incorporating the working class and other popular strata into the political system. Euro ean countries also had to face a similar challenge decades ago, gut the central position they had in the international economic system helped to ease the tensions. In the Third world or Latin America the problem is compounded because to the working class must be added large sectors of urban marginals, peasants and often the impoverished middle classes. These groups tend to form broadly-based parties which become the main contenders for power against the dominant establishment. They are placed in a somewhat similar position to that occupied by Labour, Social Democratic or Eurocommunist parties in Europe or Japan. But they are based on different organizational and ideological elements, and their popular rather than workingclass nature often involves strange coalitions. Brazil and Argentina share fully these traits. In order to understand the characteristics of the popular political parties in those two countries one must examine them in a Latin American comparative perspective.

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AMERICA COULD ALMOST be written in terms of military coups and returns to barracks. In Argentina, to take only the period since the Second world War, the military has relinquished power in 1946,1958, 1963, 1973 and 1983 (launching coups in 1955,1962,1966 and 1976). The military in Brazil, although less hyperactive than in Argentina, has relinquished power to civilians in 1945, 1955 and, incompletely so far, since 1982, while taking over government in 1954 and 1964. It seems therefore – rather paradoxically for some earlier writers on comparative politics (as was noted in the introduction) – that it is possible to speak of a military-civilian political system operating in much of South America. This features periods of military as well as civilian rule and operates largely because of a high degree of military self-confidence and the willingness of many civilians to contemplate military rule, even over a long period, with equanimity. A mere military coup, or return to barracks, need not imply a change in the political system itself. This point is not tautologous; the politica system may undergo genuine change, but only if civilian attitudes to the military (and willingness to accept military intervention) and military attitudes to civilian politics chan e fundamentally. Is there any sign that this has happened or is about to happen in the cases of Brazil and Argentina?