7 - The Roots of Stable Authoritarianism

Summary

Chapter 7 explores the reasons why Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela experienced relatively stable authoritarianism during the early twentieth century. All three countries professionalized their militaries during this period, which helped bring an end to the frequent revolts that had undermined their prospects for democracy in the nineteenth century. None of the three countries developed strong parties, however. The absence of strong parties impeded democratization in several ways. First, party weakness allowed presidents to concentrate authority and extend their hold on power in some cases. Second, and even more importantly, the weakness of opposition parties meant that the opposition had little chance of winning elections or enacting democratic reforms, particularly in the face of widespread government electoral manipulation. As a result, the opposition frequently abstained from elections, which only deepened authoritarian rule in these countries. In some instances, the opposition also encouraged the military to intervene to overthrow the president, which undermined otherwise mostly stable authoritarian regimes.

Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela traveled a very different political route than did Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay in the early twentieth century, but they began at somewhat similar places. Authoritarian rule was the norm in all seven countries throughout the nineteenth century as governments intervened regularly in elections to ensure that their favored candidates won. Nevertheless, it was an unstable form of authoritarianism. Both sets of countries had weak militaries during most of the nineteenth century, which led to frequent internal revolts that overthrew elected presidents and provoked intermittent state repression. All seven countries, however, took important steps to strengthen and professionalize their militaries in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, which resulted in a sharp decline in the frequency of revolts. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay, strong opposition parties emerged in the late nineteenth century or early twentieth century, and these parties helped bring about democracy. By contrast, in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, parties remained weak, and, as a result, these countries became relatively stable authoritarian regimes.

The absence of strong parties impeded democratization in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela in several ways. First, the weakness of parties meant that the opposition had little chance of winning elections. Opposition parties had neither the organizational strength, nor the partisan attachments necessary to overcome government electoral manipulation. Second, opposition party weakness made it difficult for the opposition to enact meaningful democratic reforms since it typically held few seats in the legislature and the ruling party consistently blocked proposed reforms. Third, the weakness of the opposition parties encouraged them to abstain from elections and seek to foment coups. Because they were too weak to defeat the ruling party in elections or overthrow it in an armed revolt, opposition parties often called on the military to intervene, which only deepened authoritarian rule. Fourth and finally, the weakness of both opposition and ruling parties allowed presidents to concentrate authority and, at times, extend their hold on power. As a result, in some cases, power became highly personalized.

Although all three countries had authoritarian regimes, there were important differences among them. Venezuela developed the most stable authoritarian regime during the early twentieth century. The Venezuelan dictators, Cipriano Castro and Juan Vicente Gómez, strengthened and modernized the military, but they also stocked it with officers from their home state of Táchira to ensure its loyalty. In addition, they developed a network of spies and used repression to eliminate any potential threats to their regime. The opposition might have been able to resist this repression had it been organized in strong parties, but Venezuela had only weak parties at the outset of the twentieth century, and none of these parties had the organization or partisan attachments necessary to survive in a hostile climate. Neither Castro nor Gómez tolerated dissent, establishing exclusionary authoritarian regimes that manipulated elections and brutally repressed opposition parties and politicians. Both leaders also sought to concentrate authority and rule indefinitely, and therefore declined to invest in a ruling party that might constrain them.

Peru also developed a relatively stable authoritarian regime during the early twentieth century, although it experienced brief periods of instability in the 1910s. During the nineteenth century, Peru was plagued by frequent opposition revolts, but the professionalization of the military at the turn of the century largely brought an end to these outsider revolts. Nevertheless, Peru failed to democratize and continued to experience occasional coup attempts. As in Venezuela, opposition parties in Peru were too weak to resist government electoral manipulation or push through democratic reforms; nor could they prevent the country’s presidents from concentrating power and seeking to extend their tenure in office. Because the opposition could not defeat the ruling party at the ballot box or on the field of battle, it at times called on the military to overthrow the regime. A couple of these coup attempts were successful in part because the Peruvian government had less control of the military than did its Venezuelan counterpart.

Brazil, like Peru and Venezuela, developed a relatively stable authoritarian regime, but it did so earlier and in a different manner than its South American neighbors. Brazil remained an empire after independence, which enabled a degree of political continuity and stability. Although Brazil experienced frequent revolts during the first couple of decades after independence, the revolts largely came to an end in the mid-nineteenth century with the accession of Emperor Pedro II and the gradual strengthening of the country’s armed forces. In 1889, the Brazilian military overthrew the emperor and created a republic, but the country did not democratize in large part because parties remained weak. Throughout the early twentieth century, Brazilian presidents and their allies intervened regularly in elections to ensure that their preferred candidates won, which opposition parties were powerless to prevent. Brazilian presidents did not concentrate power or seek to extend their terms like their counterparts in Peru and Venezuela, but neither did they permit free or fair elections. Since they could neither compete in elections nor enact democratic reforms, some members of the opposition called on military officers to intervene, which only led to increased state repression.

The Military and Revolts in Venezuela

During the wars of independence, Venezuela witnessed the most intense fighting in Spanish America, and afterwards, the regional leaders who had participated in the combat maintained control of their forces and weaponry (López-Alves 2000, 196; Guardia Rolando and Olivieri Pacheco 2016, 14–19). Little effort was initially made to centralize the means of violence in the hands of the state. Governments relied upon the regional leaders and their private militias to fend off revolts, but these same leaders often turned against the government. Even in the late nineteenth century, the national military existed more on paper than in reality – the regional leaders continued to control most troops (Irwin and Micett 2008, 141). As a result, revolts remained common throughout the nineteenth century.

The Venezuelan government established a central army after independence as well as a navy and a national militia, but these organizations remained weak and underfunded throughout the nineteenth century in large part due to anti-military sentiments, budget constraints, and resistance from regional powerbrokers. The troops typically numbered fewer than 2,500 men during the nineteenth century, which was woefully inadequate for a country the size of Venezuela (Gilmore 1964, 140–141, 148). During periods of civil war, the army often swelled. For example, in 1846, the number of troops grew from 1,155 to 11,085 men, before declining to approximately 2,000 active-duty men in 1848 (Irwin and Micett 2008, 105–108, 116). Soldiers were conscripted and they were poorly paid, fed, and housed, which undermined their discipline (Arráiz 1991, 146–149; Scheina 2003, 236). In addition, the soldiers were poorly equipped. The cavalry continued to use the lance as its main weapon until the late nineteenth century, and it was not until the 1860s that the army gained access to percussion-capped muskets and modern ordnance (Scheina 2003, 236). As late as 1878, rebels wielding machetes managed to defeat the military, which was lightly armed with poor quality rifles (Arráiz 1991, 157).

Officers and troops typically received only rudimentary training. The government established military schools, including the Military Academy of Mathematics and the Nautical School, but they were in a deplorable condition for much of the nineteenth century and educated relatively few students (Irwin and Micett 2008, 95–99, 118–119; Gilmore 1964, 130–131). Officers received military titles based on political considerations or as a reward for their service, rather than merit. As a result, officers at times outnumbered soldiers (Scheina 2003, 248).

The national militia, which in theory consisted of all able-bodied men between 18 and 40–45 years of age, served as a large reserve force for the army. In the late 1830s and 1840s, the militia had over 60,000 men (Irwin and Micett 2008, 93–94). The militia was responsible for keeping internal order, but the government had a hard time arming and mobilizing it.¹ Moreover, states and regional leaders controlled their local militia units and sometimes sent them to fight against the government. During the 1870s, the administration of Antonio Guzmán Blanco tried to limit the power of the militia units by ordering government weapons returned and by banning the import and sale of weapons, but these efforts did not significantly undermine the regional leaders’ ability to wage war (Gilmore 1964, 44–45, 119).

The low coercive capacity of the state encouraged frequent rebellions. As Table 7.1 indicates, LARD records twenty-three major revolts between 1830 and 1929, but the total number of rebellions was even higher. According to Arráiz (1991, 29–32), between 1830 and 1903, Venezuela had 166 rebellions. War was so common in Venezuela that the entire nineteenth century had only sixteen years of peace, averaging twelve acts of war per year (Tarver and Frederick 2005, 74).

Table 7.1 Major revolts in Venezuela, 1830–1930

Year	Description of revolt	Type of revolt (outcome)
1831	Regional leaders, including José Tadeo Monagas, revolted against President José A. Páez and the 1830 constitution. They surrendered in exchange for an amnesty.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1835–1836	Revolución de las Reformas. Military rebels overthrew President Vargas, but the minister of war, General Páez, assembled an army and defeated the rebels.	Military coup (took power)
1837	Colonel Francisco Farfán and the military garrison at Guayana rebelled in support of General Mariño. Páez’s army defeated the 800-man rebel army.	Military coup (suppressed)
1846–1847	Liberal supporters of Antonio Leocadio Guzmán rebelled after he lost the fraudulent 1846 presidential election. The rebellion was eventually suppressed.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1848–1849	Páez revolted after President Monagas broke off an alliance with him and organized an attack on Congress. Liberal troops of Monagas defeated the rebels.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1853	Supporters of Páez revolted in various parts of Venezuela and assembled rebel armies numbering in the thousands, but the government suppressed the revolts.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1854	General Juan Bautista Rodriguez revolted in favor of Páez with 2,600 troops, but they were defeated by the government’s 4,000-man army.	Military coup (suppressed)
1858	The March Revolution. With the support of Liberals and Conservatives, Julián Castro overthrew President Monagas when he dictated a new constitution.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1859	Manuel Vicente de las Casas, the military commander of Caracas, overthrew President Castro in a coup. Pedro Gual became president.	Military coup (took power)
1859–1863	The Federal War. Federalist regional leaders (Liberals) revolted and defeated the government in long guerrilla war. Juan Falcón became president. 20,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1861	José Echezuria, the commander of the Caracas garrison, led a coup against President Gual. Conservative military officers named Páez as president.	Military coup (took power)
1867–1868	The Blue Revolution. Former Liberal José Tadeo Monagas allied with various Conservative regional leaders and overthrew the government. 1,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1869	General Venancio Pulgar, the president and military chief of Zulia, revolted and declared independence. He raised an army of 6,000 men but they mutinied.	Military coup (suppressed)
1869–1872	April Revolution. The Liberal regional leader Antonio Guzmán Blanco financed a 6,000-man army that overthrew President Monagas. Guzmán Blanco became president.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1874	José Antonio Pulido, the minister of war, revolted in Barcelona and León Colima, a state president, revolted in Coro. They were both defeated.	Military coup (suppressed)
1878–1879	The Vindicating Revolution. Guzmán Blanco organized an army of 10,000 men and overthrew President Gregorio Valera. Guzmán Blanco became president.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1880	General José Pío Rebolledo and his garrison rebelled in Ciudad Bolivar with allied groups elsewhere. Guzmán Blanco sent 12,000 troops to suppress them.	Military coup (suppressed)
1892	The Legalist Revolution. General Joaquín Crespo overthrew President Raimundo Andueza Palacio to prevent him from extending his term. 4,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1898	The Queipa Revolution. General José Manuel Hernández rebelled in response to electoral fraud and assembled 16,000 men but was defeated.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1899	The Restorative Revolution. General Cipriano Castro overthrew the government with a rebel army of 10,000 men. 2,100 deaths.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1899–1900	General José Manuel Hernández, the minister of development, raised a rebel army of 2,000 men and revolted. He was defeated.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1901	Venezuelan General Carlos Rangel Garbiras invaded Táchira with an army of 4,000 Colombians and Venezuelan exiles, but his invasion was quickly defeated.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1901–1903	The Liberating Revolution. Various regional leaders rebelled with the support of foreign creditors. The government defeated the rebels after a prolonged war. 4,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1908	General Juan Vicente Gómez overthrew President Cipriano Castro in a nonviolent coup while Castro was in Europe for medical treatment.	Military coup (took power)

Source: Latin American Revolts Database.

The revolts had enormous human and material costs. Arraiz (1991, 175–176) calculates that the revolts cost the government about 25 percent of the revenues of the national treasury between 1830 and 1903, and this does not include the indirect costs, which were probably more than twice that amount. According to his estimates, approximately 300,000 people died in the fighting, and the conflicts may have indirectly led to the deaths of one million people (Arráiz 1991, 174).

The revolts deepened authoritarianism in Venezuela. Governments were overthrown on eleven occasions during the nineteenth century, thereby undermining constitutional rule. The revolts also led governments to arrest members of the opposition, clamp down on civil and political liberties, seize property, and engage in widespread repression. For example, during the Federalist War, Páez suspended the 1858 Constitution, revoked the liberal press laws, and gave his authorization to provincial governors to arrest anyone who published anti-government views (Loveman 1993, 154).

At the outset of the twentieth century, however, the Venezuelan government strengthened and modernized its military, which dramatically reduced the frequency of revolts. The strengthening of the military was made possible in large part by Venezuela’s growing exports, which increased at an annual rate of 5.2 percent above inflation between 1870–1929, one of the fastest rates in the region (Bértola and Ocampo 2013, 100). The economy grew particularly quickly in the early twentieth century thanks in large part to the country’s booming oil production.

Although the military modernization efforts were partly aimed at defending the government from internal rebellions, they also responded in part to external threats, which worsened significantly under President Cipriano Castro (1899–1908). In addition to its long-standing conflict with Colombia, Venezuela had a boundary dispute with Britain, which nearly led to war in 1895. Moreover, in 1902–1903, Britain, Germany, and Italy blockaded Venezuela in response to Castro’s refusal to pay its foreign debts or compensate citizens of those countries for their losses. Venezuela’s foreign relations improved under Juan Vicente Gómez who succeeded Castro in 1908, but Gómez’s domestic opponents repeatedly sought foreign support to topple him (McBeth 2008, 4–6).

President Castro took the first important steps to strengthen the military, while at the same time seeking to collect the weapons that were in private hands in order to weaken the ability of regional leaders to carry out revolts (Quintero 2009, 85–92). Castro tripled the size of the army and improved the troops’ pay and equipment, purchasing Mauser rifles, Krupp artillery, and Hotchkiss machine guns (Scheina 2003, 248; Straka 2005, 103; Schaposnik 1985, 20). In 1901 alone, the military budget doubled, reaching 47 percent of the government’s total budget (Quintero 2009, 95). Castro also sought to improve the training of officers, establishing a military academy in 1903, although it did not begin to function until 1910 (Blutstein et al. 1985, 247–248; Schaposnik 1985, 18–20). In addition, he created a general staff to run the military and he published a new military code that established stricter rules governing the promotion of officers (Schaposnik 1985, 20). Finally, he recruited large numbers of officers and troops from his home state of Táchira (Scheina 2003, 248). According to Norman Hutchinson, the US minister to Venezuela, Castro “treated [the army] better than it has ever been treated before, especially the rank and file, and he takes good care who his officers are” (cited in Scheina 2003, 248).

Efforts to strengthen the military accelerated during the reign of General Juan Vicente Gómez, who overthrew Castro in 1908 in a nonviolent coup. Gómez opened the military academy that had been decreed by Castro, and he appointed a Chilean colonel, Samuel McGill, to oversee military reform (McBeth 2008, 31–32; Schaposnik 1985, 20). McGill initially sought to remake the Venezuelan military along the lines of the Prussian army, although after World War I, the country began to copy the French model. Under his leadership, Venezuela established new military schools to train naval officers, pilots, engineers, and noncommissioned officers, among others (Schaposnik 1985, 20–21; Ziems 1979). Using the country’s growing petroleum revenues, the Gómez administration expanded the army to 8,000 men, boosted and regularized the troops’ pay, established military pensions, and purchased weaponry (Blutstein et al. 1985, 248; Schaposnik 1985, 20–25). The government also created frontier garrisons and military roadways to ensure that the army could be deployed quickly to suppress revolts and invasions.

The military was not Gómez’s only coercive arm, however. He also developed a secret police force known as La Sagrada (The Sacred), which was composed mostly of people from Gómez’s home state of Táchira (Ziems 1979, 166–167). La Sagrada functioned as a virtual army of occupation, spying on and harassing the opposition. During Gómez’s tenure they imprisoned tens of thousands of opponents of the regime, and tortured and executed many of them (Tarver and Frederick 2005, 80).

Gómez also took important steps to undermine the regional leaders. He asked foreign nations to block the export of weapons to private citizens in Venezuela, and he restricted the amount of weapons available to the state presidents, ensuring that the armories remained under his control (McBeth 2008, 6, 79–80). In 1919, he also abolished the state militias, which had often helped regional leaders overthrow the government (Blutstein et al. 1985, 248). In 1922, he prohibited private citizens from owning weapons and sought to collect those weapons that were already in private hands (Schaposnik 1985, 21).

Under Castro and Gómez, the state finally gained a monopoly on violence and Venezuela’s long era of rebellions came to an end. The last major rebellion in Venezuela occurred in 1901–1903 when Castro’s troops, under the command of Gómez, defeated the rebels after prolonged fighting. Although elements in the military and a few opposition leaders attempted insurrections during the three decades that followed, the government quickly suppressed these revolts (McBeth 2008).

Weak Parties and Authoritarianism in Venezuela

The strengthening of the military in Venezuela did not lead to democratization in large part because Venezuelan parties remained weak at the outset of the twentieth century. Various groupings that were commonly referred to as parties had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, but they represented little more than the personal followings of individual politicians (Pérez 1996, 49). The Conservative Party, for example, consisted of a loose grouping surrounding the Venezuelan independence leader, José Antonio Páez, which governed Venezuela in the immediate post-independence period (Lombardi 1982, 179; Pérez 1996, 51).² The Liberal Party, meanwhile, revolved around its founder, Antonio Leocadio Guzmán.³

Although the Conservative and the Liberal parties endured for many decades, both remained personalistic institutions without permanent organizations (Gilmore 1964, 25, 27, 56; Pérez 1996, 49). Páez dominated the Conservative Party, throughout its existence, whereas Guzmán and his son, Antonio Guzmán Blanco, controlled the Liberal Party for much of the nineteenth century. The two parties fragmented frequently along personalistic lines. The Conservatives, for instance, split in the late 1850s between supporters of Páez, who were referred to as dictatorials, and adherents of Pedro Gual and Manuel Felipe Tovar, who were called constitutionalists (Tarver and Frederick 2005, 67–68). Similarly, in the 1860s, the faction of the Liberals that supported José Gregorio Monagas and José Tadeo Monagas became known as the Blue Liberals, while the group that supported Guzmán Blanco were called the Yellow Liberals (Pérez 1996, 61–62).⁴

The two parties did not have consistent ideological differences, but each party frequently criticized the policies and platforms of the other (Tarver and Frederick 2005, 64; Gil Fortoul 1956, 364–365; Rey 2015, 62). Indeed, Guzmán famously said, “if our opponents had declared in favor of federalism, we would have declared in favor of centralism” (Tinker Salas 2015, 42). Both parties often took antagonistic positions vis-à-vis the Catholic Church, although their hostility toward the Church varied over time. Each party’s economic policies and positions on democratic reforms also changed over time, depending in part on whether it was in power. When it was in the opposition, the Liberal Party, for example, denounced the economic program and electoral manipulation of the Conservatives, but it carried out many of the same policies when it came to power (Butler 1972, chs. 2–3; Pérez 1996).

Both parties represented the elites and some leaders, such as the Monagas brothers, moved between them. Under Antonio Leocadio Guzmán, the Liberal Party obtained a lot of backing from artisans and other members of the working classes, which frightened the Conservatives as well as some Liberal elites (Butler 1972, 58–60, 64–65, 71–75, 77–78; Lombardi 1982, 180–181). The Liberal Party also initially presented itself as the party of agriculture and drew more support from agricultural interests.

Nevertheless, neither party established meaningful organizations or strong roots in Venezuelan society, which contributed to their fragility. The Conservative Party fell apart in the 1860s after the Federal War (Pérez 1996, 61; Tarver and Frederick 2005, 68). The Liberal Party was also weakened by the war, but it survived in various forms until the early twentieth century when it disintegrated with the rise of the dictatorships of Cipriano Castro and Juan Vicente Gómez.

The weakness of parties in Venezuela undermined the prospects for democracy in two main ways. First, the weakness of opposition parties meant that they could neither defeat the government at the ballot box nor resist government electoral manipulation. Venezuela held regular elections throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but these elections were mostly uncompetitive, and sometimes uncontested, because of the disorganization of the opposition. Second, the weakness of both opposition and ruling parties meant that presidents could concentrate power and seek to extend their term in office. As a result, Venezuelan politics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was characterized by a very high degree of personalism.

In the early nineteenth century, when the Conservative and Liberal parties first emerged and maintained a degree of parity, Venezuelan elections were at times competitive. In the 1834 presidential elections, a liberal opposition candidate, José Antonio Vargas, even triumphed over the conservative candidate favored by the incumbent, although Vargas was quickly overthrown (Gabaldón 1986; Posada-Carbó 1999). The 1846 presidential elections, in which General José Tadeo Monagas narrowly defeated General Bartolomé Salom, was also highly competitive. According to Deas (2012, 14), “the run-up to the election of 1846 was an unprecedented campaign, and more intense popular mobilization than had been seen in Venezuela, or perhaps any South American country at that time.” Even the 1842 and 1850 elections had a degree of competition, although Navas Blanco (1993, 64–65) characterizes these as controlled elections in which the incumbent imposed his successor.

By contrast, after the disintegration of the Conservative Party, presidential elections in Venezuela had little, if any, competition, as the incumbent intervened extensively to ensure his own reelection or to impose his successor. Whereas the winner won 67 percent of the vote on average in presidential elections during the first half of the nineteenth century, he won 92 percent of the vote in the second half of the nineteenth century. In many presidential elections during the late nineteenth century, the official candidate won by a share of the vote that was so large as to strain belief. Joaquín Crespo, for example, was reported to have won 349,447 of the 350,450 valid votes cast in 1893 (Botello 2009, 61; Sanoja Hernández 1998, 12). Many elections in the late nineteenth century were not even contested, and where competition did exist, as in 1868 and 1876, it generally occurred among members of the same party or even the same family. In 1868, for example, the winning candidate, José Tadeo Monagas, who was eighty-four years old and somewhat reluctant to run, competed against his son and his nephew. Monagas won a plurality of the votes but died before he could take office, leading Congress to elect his son to take his place (Mendoza 2016; Rodríguez 1997).⁵

The one major democratic advance that occurred in the late nineteenth century was the establishment of universal male suffrage. The 1857 constitution abolished all property and income restrictions on the franchise, and although it imposed a literacy restriction, it suspended this requirement until 1880 (Bushnell 1972). The 1858 constitution then eliminated the literacy restriction altogether, granting suffrage to all male citizens above the age of twenty (Bushnell 1972, 203–205; Urdaneta García 2007, 120, 123–124). The enactment of universal male suffrage led to a dramatic increase in voter turnout in Venezuela: Valid votes rose from 4.7 percent of the population in 1846 to 9.6 percent in 1868 and 15.1 percent in 1893. Nevertheless, the expansion of suffrage did not lead to an improvement in the fairness of the elections.

Throughout the nineteenth century, Venezuelan politics was characterized by a high degree of personalism, which was made possible in large part by the weakness of parties. Presidents concentrated authority, manipulated elections, and extended their terms at the expense of rivals within their own party as well as in the opposition. For example, the Monagas brothers, José Tadeo and José Gregorio, dominated Venezuelan politics for a dozen years, taking turns in the presidency and practicing the “shameless manipulation and corruption” of elections (Deas 2012, 19). During this period, they switched parties, expanded the powers of the president, purged the legislature of their opponents, declared all gubernatorial and congressional offices vacant, and revised the constitution to allow presidential reelection (Butler 1972, 86–90, 191–193; Lombardi 1982, 182–183; Floyd 1982, 15). Their time in power only came to an end in 1858 when Conservatives and Liberals joined forces to overthrow them.

Another lengthy experience with personalistic rule began a decade later after Antonio Guzmán Blanco, the son of the founder of the Liberal Party, seized power in the 1869 April Revolution. Guzmán Blanco, who referred to himself as the “Illustrious American,” ruled Venezuela for most of the next eighteen years. During this period, he refounded the Liberal Party, renaming it the Great Yellow Liberal Party, but he declined to provide it with organization or independent leadership (Bautista Urbaneja and Magallanes 1997; Magallanes 1973, 134–136; Pérez 1996, 61–62).⁶ As president, Guzmán Blanco centralized power and tightly controlled elections. In the 1872 elections, he was reported to have won 239,691 of the 239,709 votes cast (Bushnell 1997, 203; Franceschi 2019, 137). Guzmán Blanco also made changes to the electoral system that severely compromised the country’s elections. In 1874, for example, he modified the constitution to require signed public votes, which were easier for the government authorities to monitor.

Guzmán Blanco briefly left power in 1876, but he returned to Venezuela in 1879, assembling a 10,000-man rebel army, which overthrew the government. The following year, a new Congress elected Guzmán Blanco as president, without any opposition, and granted him extraordinary powers (Pino Iturrieta 1997). Congress also drafted a new constitution that suppressed popular elections, which enabled Guzmán Blanco to be reelected unanimously as president by Congress in 1882 and 1886, before he departed to Europe for the final time in 1887.

Personalistic rule in Venezuela continued in the early twentieth century under the dictatorial regimes of Cipriano Castro and Juan Vicente Gómez. Castro seized power in 1899 at the head of a rebel army from the Andean state of Táchira. He faced various revolts at the outset of his regime, but he managed to defeat them all thanks in part to the loyalty of his Andean comrades-in-arms. Castro initially governed with a cabinet composed largely of Liberal politicians and regional leaders, but he gradually replaced them with Andean allies (Viloria Vera 2009, 96). He founded his own party, the Restorative Liberal Party, to take the place of the existing parties, but it was a personalistic vehicle that lacked organizational structure (Magallanes 1973, 208–209). Castro’s main base of support was the military, which he built up to strengthen his grasp on power, using it to repress any individuals or groups that posed a threat to him. Castro, like Guzmán Blanco, used indirect elections to maintain his hold on power, creating a system in which the secrecy of the vote was severely restricted and municipal councils and state legislatures played the lead role in presidential elections (Lott 1956, 427; Arráiz Luca 2012, 51–52). This system ensured Castro’s uncontested election as president in 1901 and again in 1904, after he amended the constitution to run for another six-year term.

In 1908, however, Castro’s second-in-command, General Juan Vicente Gómez, seized power when the president was on a trip to Europe, prohibiting him from returning to the country. Gómez ruled the country in dictatorial fashion until his death in 1935, although at times he exercised power through puppet presidents while remaining commander-in-chief of the Venezuelan armed forces. Although many Liberal politicians supported him at the outset and he initially brought some Liberals into his regime, Gómez quickly turned against the traditional political elites, excluding them from his cabinet and exiling, imprisoning, and even killing those who dared oppose him (McBeth 2008, 24–27, 30–31, 63, 318). Gómez and his advisers believed that there was no need for political parties and he sought to “unite Venezuelans without distinction of parties” (McBeth 2008, 372; Rey 2015, 63–64). He revised the constitution to require that the president be elected by the National Congress, which was chosen in a two-stage system controlled by the president and the interior minister (McBeth 2008, 32–33; Velásquez 1997). This enabled Gómez and his puppets to be elected unanimously in 1910, 1915, 1922, and 1929 (Gómez 2009). The existing parties, which were too weak to resist his iron rule, disappeared altogether.

Thus, the strength of the military and the weakness of parties created stable authoritarian rule in Venezuela. The modernization of the military at the outset of the twentieth century brought an end to the revolts that had plagued Venezuela throughout the nineteenth century, but opposition parties were too weak and unorganized to contest elections or enact democratic reforms. Under Castro and Gómez, the existing parties disintegrated as the two dictators imposed a highly repressive and personalistic form of authoritarianism.

The Military and Revolts in Peru

Peru also failed to democratize during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For much of the nineteenth century, Peru had a relatively small and nonprofessional military, which encouraged opposition revolts. In the 1830s, for example, the army was fixed at 2,950 troops, and in 1872, it was set at 4,000 men, which was quite small for a country the size of Peru (Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 108, 158, 188). The army expanded during and immediately before the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), but in the aftermath of the war the size of the army was fixed at 3,000 men (Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 364). Even during wartime, Peru struggled to mobilize more than 8,000 troops (Soifer 2015, 210).

The organization and training of the military was quite deficient (Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 357–360). The Peruvian military lacked a general staff and many types of military specialists, such as engineers, throughout most of the nineteenth century (Scheina 2003, 377; Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 358). What training officers and the troops received was rudimentary. Various Peruvian governments established military schools over the course of the nineteenth century, but these schools generally did not remain open for long (Muñoz 1932, 7–24; Reano 2002, 53–55). According to Nunn (1983, 54), “military training was in a sorry state,” even at the end of the nineteenth century. Officers were typically promoted or discharged based on their political connections rather than their abilities or experience. Presidents frequently purged the military after rebellions and sought to stack it with their supporters. Partly as a result, the military tended to be quite top heavy. As late as 1900, there were ninety-three officers for every 100 soldiers (Villanueva 1971, 35). Officers typically came from the elite or the middle class and were of European or mixed descent, but soldiers came from the poorest sectors of the population, especially the indigenous peasantry, and many of them were illiterate (Nunn 1983, 54–55). Many of the troops were forcibly impressed, although the constitution explicitly prohibited conscription (Mücke 2004, 174–175).

Military spending represented a large share of the government’s budget (45 percent in 1900), but most funds went to retired officers, invalids, and war survivors, rather than to purchase weaponry or to pay active-duty officers and troops (Villanueva 1971, 35). Officer salaries were quite low, which reduced the appeal of the profession for many. In 1900, a military general earned the same as he had twenty-seven years earlier, which was less than a bishop, a prefect, or the director of a government ministry (Villanueva 1971, 17–18, 48). The equipment of the Peruvian military was also typically shoddy despite periodic efforts to upgrade it. During the War of the Pacific, for example, the Peruvians had equipment that was clearly inferior to that of the Chileans and they lacked modern field artillery (Scheina 2003, 377).

In addition to the regular military, Peru had civilian militias and the line between the two was often blurry. Militia members were sometimes incorporated into the army, particularly during and after rebellions (Sobrevilla Perea 2012, 162; Reano 2002, 57). In some cases, the militias guarded the government against internal and external threats. President Manuel Pardo, for example, sought to build up the national guard in the 1870s as a counterbalance to the military, stacking it with his own supporters from the Civil Party (Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 185). In many cases, however, the militias undermined state security by participating in rebellions against the central government.

The weakness of the military encouraged frequent revolts. Between 1830 and 1900, Peru experienced nineteen major rebellions and numerous minor ones. See Table 7.2. Many of the revolts were quite violent, and eight of them involved more than 1,000 battlefield deaths. Opposition leaders headed most of the revolts: Ten of the nineteen major revolts were insurrections by opposition elites, seven were military rebellions, and two were popular uprisings. Defecting military units or national guardsmen often participated in the opposition revolts, however. For example, in 1894–1895, Nicolás Piérola, the head of the opposition Partido Demócrata, returned from exile in Chile and raised an army of 5,000 troops by taking in civilian volunteers and militia members.

Table 7.2 Major revolts in Peru, 1830–1929

Year	Description of revolts	Type of revolt (outcome)
1834	General Pedro Bermúdez led an unsuccessful military revolt against the liberal president, General Luis José de Orbegoso, after Bermúdez lost the election.	Military coup (suppressed)
1835	The Callao garrison revolted against President Orbegoso and General Felipe Salaverry took control of the rebellion and declared himself chief of state.	Military coup (took power)
1835–1836	Orbegoso joined forces with the president of Bolivia, Andrés de Santa Cruz, and defeated Salaverry and his ally, former president Agustín Gamarra.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1836–1839	Chile and Argentina along with Peruvian dissidents defeated the Peru–Bolivian Confederation, and Agustín Gamarra became president of Peru.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1842	General Juan Crisostomo Torrico, who was the head of the Army of the North, carried out a coup overthrowing President Manuel Menéndez.	Military coup (took power)
1842	General Francisco de Vidal, who was the constitutional successor of Menéndez, rose up with the Army of the South and defeated Torrico.	Military coup (took power)
1843	General Manuel Ignacio de Vivanco, who was minister of war, carried out a rebellion and overthrew General Vidal.	Military coup (took power)
1843–1844	The Constitutional Revolution. Rebels under General Ramón Castilla defeated the troops of Manuel Vivanco and restored Manuel Menéndez to the presidency.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1844	Domingo Elias, the prefect of Lima, rebelled and named himself political-military chief of the Republic while President Vivanco was in the south.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1854	Liberal Revolution of 1854. Liberals led by General Ramón Castilla overthrew the government of José Rufino Echenique and wrote a new constitution.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1856–1858	Conservatives led by Manuel Ignacio de Vivanco rebelled against the liberal Constitution of 1856. They were defeated by Castilla in a lengthy civil war.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1865	Colonel Mariano Prado and allies overthrew President Juan Antonio Pezet when he signed an unfavorable treaty with Spain. Prado became president.	Military coup (took power)
1867	Civil War of 1867. General Pedro Diez Canseco and Colonel José Balta overthrew President Mariano Prado, and Diez Canseco became president.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1870	Over 1,000 Chinese workers in Pativilca revolted against the deplorable working conditions in the plantations. The rebellion was brutally suppressed.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1872	General Tomás Gutiérrez, the defense minister, and his brothers seized power, but they were overthrown after four days and lynched.	Military coup (suppressed)
1879	Nicolás de Piérola overthrew President Mariano Prado when he left for Europe to seek loans during the War of the Pacific.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1884–1885	General Andrés Cáceres rebelled against President Miguel Iglesias who had been put in power by Chile. Cáceres became president.	Military coup (took power)
1885	Indigenous population rebelled against the reimposition of a poll tax and treatment of leaders. They were brutally repressed.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1894–1895	Nicolás de Piérola overthrew President Cáceres after he arranged his own fraudulent reelection. Piérola became president.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1914	Military Chief of Staff Colonel Oscar Benavides overthrew President Guillermo Billinghurst after he dismissed him. Benavides became president.	Military coup (took power)
1919	Augusto Leguia, a presidential candidate, seized power with the help of the police and some military officers because he feared he would be denied victory.	Elite insurrection (took power)
1923–1924	Indigenous peasants in Puno rebelled against local authorities, but the revolt was brutally repressed by local authorities and the army with 2,000 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)

Source: Latin American Revolts Database.

The frequent revolts hindered the prospects for democracy in Peru. Many of the rebellions succeeded: On fourteen occasions in the nineteenth century, rebels overthrew the government and installed a new president by force. For example, in 1895, Piérola’s volunteer troops defeated the regular army in a bloody battle and occupied Lima, sending the existing president, Andrés Avelino Cáceres, into exile. These forcible seizures of power undermined constitutional rule and encouraged further revolts. The revolts also deepened authoritarianism by provoking state repression and the abrogation of civil and political liberties. Peruvian constitutions typically provided the government with the right to suspend constitutional guarantees in the event of internal or external threats, and presidents did not hesitate to declare a state of emergency in response to revolts. The 1839 constitution, for example, gave the president almost unlimited authority to suspend constitutional rights, and Article 59 of the 1860 constitution, which was in place until 1920, allowed for the suspension of constitutional guarantees when “the Fatherland is in danger” (Loveman 1993, 220, 229–230).

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, Peru took major steps to professionalize its military, which largely brought an end to the opposition revolts. Peru sought to professionalize its military in part to discourage domestic insurrections but also to deal with external threats (Nunn 1983, 64–65). The Peruvian military was particularly concerned about Chile, which had defeated and taken land from Peru during the War of the Pacific. When Chile strengthened and professionalized its armed forces in the 1880s and 1890s, Peru felt compelled to respond.

Peru’s military professionalization efforts were made possible by the rapid growth in exports registered in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which dramatically increased government revenue. Between 1895 and 1899, Peruvian exports tripled and government revenues doubled, and they continued to increase in the first few decades of the twentieth century (Villanueva 1978, 80). Indeed, between 1913 and 1929, exports grew by an annual average of 12.4 percent in real terms, the second highest rate in Latin America (Bértola and Ocampo 2013, 100).

The professionalization efforts began during the second administration of Nicolás Piérola (1895–1899). After taking power in 1895, Piérola dismissed and retired many of those officers who had remained loyal to the former president and reduced the army’s size and share of the national budget (Klarén 1986, 601). Piérola then brought in a French mission to professionalize the military. The French mission helped draft important legislation, including a military legal code, an obligatory military service law, an organizational and administrative code, and regulations on promotions, military pay, pensions, and retirement (Nunn 1983, 114–116; Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 349–352). Under the compulsory military service law, which took effect in 1898, the size of the Peruvian military more than tripled in ten years (Klarén 1986, 601). The French mission also promoted the acquisition of French weapons and oversaw the creation of munitions factories within Peru (Loveman 1999, 86).

With the assistance of the French mission, the government improved the training of military officers. It revived the Military School at Chorillos in 1898 and required all officers to attend it, and in 1904, it opened the Superior War College, which trained upper-ranking officers (Nunn 1983, 116–120). Between 1896 and 1914, thirty-three French officers taught in the various military schools in Peru, creating a cadre of Peruvian officers who were imbued with French military doctrine (Nunn 1983, 117). Although the French mission came to an end with the outbreak of World War I, it started up again after the war. From 1919 to 1925, twenty-four more French officers came to Peru, and ten more came between 1925 and 1940, although after 1922 they came as individuals rather than as part of a mission (Nunn 1983, 198–199). By 1930, more than a quarter of high-ranking Peruvian military officers had graduated from the Superior War Academy (Loveman 1999, 86).

The French mission encountered various problems, including resource shortages, political interference, the lack of prior preparation of the officers and the troops, and frequent administrative changes within the Peruvian high command (Nunn 1983, 121–122; Loveman 1999, 86–88). Politicians continued to interfere with promotions, raises, and assignments, and nationalists both inside and outside the military resented the French and accused them of peddling French weaponry to serve their own interests (Nunn 1983, 201).⁷ In spite of these problems, however, the French mission made a great deal of progress, transforming the Peruvian military in important ways (Hidalgo Morey et al. 2005, 344–352; Loveman 1999, 86; Villanueva 1971, 64). Indeed, Nunn (1983, 120) suggests that the Peruvian officers the French mission trained were the equal of the Chilean officers in terms of the scientific and technical knowledge and clearly superior to the Argentines or the Brazilians.

As a result of the strengthening of the Peruvian military, the number of outsider revolts declined dramatically. Once the armed forces became professionalized, opposition forces had little chance of defeating the military and so they largely desisted from launching their own revolts. Those revolts that the opposition did attempt either failed to get off the ground or were quickly suppressed. For example, in 1909, Nicolás de Piérola’s brother and sons, along with approximately twenty-five militants of the opposition Partido Demócrata, staged a violent kidnapping of President Augusto Leguía in 1909, but the military quickly suppressed this uprising. Augusto Durand, the leader of the Liberal Party, similarly engaged in a variety of unsuccessful revolutionary plots during the early twentieth century (Pike 1969, 186–187; Peralta 2005, 87). As we shall see, a more successful opposition strategy was to try to persuade the military to intervene. Indeed, the only successful revolts in Peru during the early twentieth century involved the direct participation of the military.

Weak Parties and Authoritarianism in Peru

Although the professionalization of the military largely brought an end to outsider revolts, it did not lead to democracy in large part because Peru continued to have weak parties. With the partial exception of the Civil Party, the parties that arose in Peru in the nineteenth century tended to be personalistic and relatively short lived.⁸ Indeed, none of them lasted beyond the 1930s. The parties had little in the way of organizational structures and few formal members: One prominent politician of that time observed that “the total membership of any given political party in Peru could easily fit into one railroad coach” (cited in Stein 1980, 25). Nor were the parties particularly ideological. According to Victor Andrés Belaunde, Peruvian political parties of this period were “inconsistent and ephemeral personal groupings” (cited in Klarén 2000, 214).

Electoral clubs emerged in Peru in the mid-nineteenth century, but the first real party, the Civil Party, did not arise until the 1870s.⁹ Manuel Pardo, a prominent businessman and the first civilian president of Peru, founded the party, which was then known as the Society of Electoral Independence, to support his successful presidential candidacy in 1872. Pardo developed a large national network of supporting organizations in this campaign, but it was not until the late 1870s, when he went into exile, that the party institutionalized to a degree and acquired a relatively disciplined contingent in the legislature (Mücke 2004, 64).¹⁰ The party never developed a strong national organization, however. It did not have formal members during this period, nor did it develop a clear platform, bureaucratic rules, or any permanent organizations aside from an executive committee and its parliamentary contingent (Mücke 2004, 200–201). Moreover, the party weakened considerably beginning in the 1880s.

The other political parties that arose in Peru during this period were even more personalistic and weakly organized than the Civil Party. According to Klarén (2000, 214): “Three of Peru’s early political parties were entirely based on personal loyalties to an individual caudillo.” These parties were: the Constitutional Party of General Andrés Avelino Cáceres, which was founded in 1884; the Democrat Party, which was created by Nicolas de Piérola in 1884; and the Liberal Party of Augusto Durand, which was formed in 1900. The three parties lacked organization, ideologies, and internal discipline, not to mention a second generation of leaders (Pike 1969, 218). Although the parties lasted until the 1920s, they operated on the margins of power during the twentieth century and did not long survive the deaths of their founders.

The weakness of parties in Peru meant that the opposition could not typically compete with government-sponsored candidates or resist government manipulation of elections during the nineteenth century. Both the government and the opposition bought the support of local notables, legislators, electors, voters, and party combatants, but the government typically had more money to spend, given its access to state coffers (Mücke 2004, 99–100; 2001, 331–332). Local government authorities also controlled the electoral registries, which they could use to disqualify opposition voters (Mücke 2004, 83). In addition, Peruvian governments frequently used the police and the military to prevent opposition supporters from voting by intervening in the battles for the control of the public squares and other locations where elections were conducted. According to Aljovín de Losada (2014, 62), these battles were so violent that elections in the postwar period at times resembled civil wars. A Lima newspaper reported that the government’s candidate, Mariano Prado, won the 1876 presidential elections “because his partisans were armed with modern Winchester carbines, whereas [the opposition’s] supporters were equipped only with revolvers” (Pike 1969, 139).

During the nineteenth century, an opposition candidate did win the presidency twice. In 1833, a constitutional convention elected an opposition liberal, General Luis Jose de Orbegoso, in large part because the opposition was united and the incumbent and his preferred candidate were unpopular (Basadre 1968, 62). Similarly, in 1872, Manuel Pardo prevailed over the candidates supported by the incumbent thanks in part to the use of his considerable personal resources in his campaign. Nevertheless, these were exceptions to the general rule of government control. Many nineteenth-century elections were not even contested since the opposition was sometimes barred from competing or opted to abstain rather than participate in an election that they had no chance of winning. Only fourteen of the twenty-one presidential elections in Peru during the nineteenth century had more than one candidate, and only five of the twenty-one presidential elections were competitive (meaning that the winner won less than 70 percent of the valid vote). On average, the winner captured 83.9 percent of the presidential vote during the nineteenth century and the average margin of victory was 72.1 percentage points.

The weakness of parties in nineteenth-century Peru enabled presidents to concentrate power and act in undemocratic ways. The legislature at times resisted the president, but it had limited authority and it was fairly common during the nineteenth century for presidents to shut down Congress altogether (Sobrevilla Perea 2017, 226). In 1858, for example, President Ramón Castilla closed a recalcitrant legislature, silenced independent newspapers, and exiled many of his opponents in order to elect a more pliant assembly, which drafted a constitution that was to his liking (Pike 1969, 108). After the death of President Remigio Morales Bermúdez in 1894, a former president, Andrés Cáceres, engineered a nonviolent coup to elevate the second vice-president, Justiniano Borgoño, to the presidency instead of the constitutionally mandated first vice-president whom Cáceres did not trust. Once in office, Borgoño assured Cáceres’ reelection as president in 1894, arresting any opposition leaders who might have gotten in the way (Klarén 2000, 201; Pike 1969, 156–157).

Although opposition parties called for democratic reforms and curbs on the power of the executive, they generally did not have the legislative votes to enact such measures on their own. The ruling party typically controlled a majority of the seats in the legislature, and members of the ruling party generally obeyed the dictates of the president. Even the Civil Party, the best organized party in Peru in the nineteenth century, was largely dominated by its leader, Manuel Pardo, during his tenure as president.

Peru did take some steps toward democracy in the early twentieth century. Piérola’s seizure of power in 1895 ushered in a period that became known as the Aristocratic Republic (1895–1914), during which electoral violence declined. Congress played an increasingly important role in politics during this period, and it often opposed executive initiatives. The legislature, for example, rejected presidential budgets in 1901, 1903, 1911, 1914, and 1917, and blocked a number of other major presidential initiatives during this period (Klarén 2000, 216).¹¹ In addition, Piérola enacted a new electoral law in 1896 that reinstituted municipal elections, mandated a direct popular vote in presidential elections, and established minority representation in legislative elections (Peralta 2005, 77–78; Aguilar Gil 2002, 11; Pike 1969, 173).

The 1896 electoral reform, however, represented a step backward for Peruvian democracy in that it restricted the suffrage. As Chapter 2 discussed, Peru had universal male suffrage from 1828 to 1834 and 1855 to 1856, and it maintained relatively broad suffrage rights during most of the late nineteenth century because the 1856 and 1860 constitutions enfranchised anyone who satisfied either the economic or the literacy requirements, which many Peruvians did in the mid-nineteenth century (Mücke 2004, 82; Peloso 1996, 195). The 1896 reform, however, made literacy a prerequisite for voting, which disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of, mostly indigenous, people since only 24.3 percent of Peruvians were literate in 1900 (Thorp 1998, 354). The disenfranchisement of large sectors of the population was intentional. The Senate Commission that approved this reform argued that “it was not in the interest of the Nation that many participate in elections, but rather that those who participate do so well” (Cited in Klarén 2000, 206).¹² In the wake of the reform, voter turnout fell dramatically. In the 1890 presidential elections, valid votes had represented 12 percent of the population, but this figure declined to 1.6 percent in 1899. Voter turnout inched upward in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but it still averaged only 3.2 percent in presidential elections during this period.

The 1896 law also created a National Electoral Board to supervise elections, which helped bring an end to some undemocratic practices, such as the battles over the electoral tables and congressional certification of elections (Peralta 2005, 79; Aguilar Gil 2002, 11). Nevertheless, the electoral reform did not establish the secret ballot, which enabled the government to monitor how state employees and others voted (Pike 1969, 173). This allowed the government to intimidate voters and to disqualify supporters of the opposition. Although reforms were enacted to the electoral law in 1908, 1912, and 1915, they did little to address the restrictions on the franchise or government electoral manipulation (Peralta 2005, 89).

Perhaps most importantly, the weakness of parties in Peru enabled the executive to ignore or manipulate the electoral authorities and to run roughshod over the opposition. After coming to power in 1895, Piérola forged a coalition between his party, the Democrat Party, and the Civil Party. This alliance easily won the elections that year since Piérola controlled the electoral authorities and the Constitutional Party was banned from participating (Peralta 2005, 77).¹³ In the 1899 elections, Piérola shut down the National Electoral Board and intervened to ensure that his handpicked successor, Eduardo López de Romaña, won the elections, which the Constitutional Party and some other candidates boycotted in protest (Pike 1969, 175; Aguilar Gil 2002, 25; Peralta 2005, 81). Soon after taking office, however, López de Romaña had a falling out with Piérola and allied with the Civil Party, which gradually gained control of the key ministries in his government as well as the majority of the seats on the reopened National Electoral Board.¹⁴ The Civil Party used its control of the government and the electoral authorities to dominate elections over the next ten years, committing a variety of electoral abuses (Klarén 2000, 203; Stein 1980, 28; Aguilar Gil 2002, 23, 28, 32).¹⁵ Some of the violations were particularly egregious. For example, President Augusto Leguía dissolved the National Electoral Board in the run-up to the 1911 legislative elections and then intervened extensively to ensure that the government won a majority of the races (Peralta 2005, 92; Aguilar Gil 2002, 34).

In response, opposition parties often abstained from presidential elections, and sometimes municipal and legislative elections as well. The Democrat Party, for example, declined to compete in the 1903, 1904, and 1908 presidential elections. Only four of the nine presidential elections that took place during the Aristocratic Republic period were contested. Moreover, only two of the nine presidential elections during this period were competitive: the 1912 and the 1919 elections. The winning presidential candidates captured 82.6 percent of the vote on average and triumphed by an average margin of 77.4 percentage points during this period.

With few other alternatives at its disposal, the opposition sometimes urged the military to intervene to overthrow governments it opposed. These coups only served to entrench authoritarian rule, however. The first coup of the Aristocratic Republic took place in 1914 when President Guillermo Billinghurst was overthrown. Billinghurst, a populist former mayor of Lima, had become president in 1912 with the support of a broad coalition of opposition parties, which included a large dissident faction of the Civil Party. The Leguía administration supported the official Civil Party candidate, Antero Aspíllaga, who appeared headed toward victory, but Billinghurst’s working-class supporters called a strike and disrupted the election in Lima by attacking polling places and chasing off the electoral authorities (Stein 1980, 33; Gerlach 1973, 17–18). Since the number of ballots cast did not reach the requisite one-third of eligible voters, the election was declared constitutionally invalid and it fell to Congress to choose the winner (Peralta 2005, 94; Aguilar Gil 2002, 38). President Leguía’s supporters in Congress then agreed to vote to confirm Billinghurst as president in exchange for Leguía’s brother being elected as the first vice-president (Klarén 2000, 223–224; Blanchard 1977, 258).

Billinghurst never developed a good working relationship with the existing parties, however. He tried to bypass them by enacting his budget and labor legislation by decree, and he reportedly even planned to dissolve Congress and hold new elections to gain a more compliant body (Blanchard 1977, 267–269; Gerlach 1973, 31–32). Instead of relying on parties, Billinghurst sought to build up his base of support among the workers, intervening in strikes and calling for the enactment of new labor laws. He mobilized workers to intervene in elections and attack opposition newspapers and leaders (Blanchard 1977, 264–265; Gerlach 1973, 28–31). Opposition leaders, including the Liberal leader Augusto Durand and right-wing Civilista leaders, Jorge and Manuel Prado, objected strenuously to Billinghurst’s policies and authoritarian inclinations, and began to seek the support of the military to overthrow him (Pike 1969, 200–201; Blanchard 1977, 267–270; Gerlach 1973, 39–42). They managed to obtain the backing of key military officers, including the army chief of staff, Colonel Oscar Benavides, who were disgruntled with Billinghurst in part because of military cutbacks and rumors that the president was going to arm his supporters (Blanchard 1977, 270–271; Gerlach 1973, 45–47). When Billinghurst got word of these plots in February 1914, he dismissed Benavides who responded by mobilizing the Lima garrison against the president. After a two-hour gun battle at the presidential palace that led to 50–60 deaths, the military rebels seized Billinghurst and sent him into exile (Gerlach 1973, 51–54).

The return to civilian rule in 1915 did not bring about democracy, however, in part because parties remained weak and divided. The ruling Civil Party split into four main factions that warred with each other, and public support for the party ebbed (Stein 1980, 36–37). President José Pardo, who was elected in 1915, governed in the same personalistic and arbitrary manner that previous presidents had, intervening in elections to help his preferred candidates (Klarén 2000, 235; Peralta 2005, 98–99; Stein 1980, 36). As Pardo’s term came to an end in 1919, two main candidates emerged to succeed him: the former president and ex-Civilista, Augusto Leguía; and Antero Aspíllaga, the conservative leader of the Independent Civil Party who had lost to Billinghurst in 1912. Pardo supported Aspíllaga, and the government intervened to help him, closing an opposition newspaper, falsifying electoral registries and votes, and intimidating the opposition (Peralta 2005, 99–100). The main branch of the Civil Party, along with the Constitutional Party, the Liberal Party, and even the Socialist Party, rallied around Leguía, however, as did students, labor unions, and middle-class organizations (Pike 1969, 214; Gerlach 1973, 116–117).

According to the official returns, Leguía won by a large margin, capturing 122,736 votes to Aspíllaga’s 64,936, but Aspíllaga refused to accept his loss, arguing that there was widespread fraud, particularly in rural areas. Although most observers suggest that the government had committed more electoral abuses than Leguía’s supporters, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions favoring Aspíllaga (Peralta 2005, 99–100; Klarén 2000, 238). Aspíllaga and Pardo insisted that Congress decide the winner of the elections, but Leguía refused to accept this, given that he did not control a majority of votes in the legislature (Gerlach 1973, 118–119). Instead, Leguía sought out the support of the military and the police to overthrow Pardo. In July 1919, some army and naval officers revolted and a contingent of ninety police officers under the command of an army colonel took over the presidential palace, with the assistance of some rebellious palace guards (Gerlach 1973, 122–127). Leguía then assumed power, sending Pardo into exile.¹⁶

Once in power, Leguía quickly moved to concentrate his power and undermine the opposition, establishing a personalist dictatorship that would last for eleven years. He dissolved Congress and called new legislative elections, which enabled him to gain control of the legislature. The legislature then drafted a new constitution that helped consolidate Leguia’s control, enabling him to appoint provisional municipal officials and suspend municipal elections and provincial councils (Peralta 2005, 102–103; Pike 1969, 220–221; Stein 1980, 47). At the same time, Leguía jailed and exiled independent journalists and harassed or shut down newspapers that were critical of him, even turning one opposition paper, La Prensa, into a government mouthpiece (Pike 1969, 224–225; Peralta 2005, 103). He also suppressed student protests and enacted an educational reform that enabled him to get rid of university professors who were his political opponents (Pike 1969, 223–223). Although Leguía initially tolerated the labor unions, some of which had supported him in the 1919 elections, by 1923 he had turned against them, and in 1927 he banned all union activities and arrested the most prominent labor leaders, forcing them underground (Stein 1980, 78). Leguía twice revised the constitution to make it possible for him to run for reelection in 1924 and again in 1929. In both elections, he ran unopposed and his supporters triumphed in the legislative elections, gaining firm control of both chambers of Congress (Peralta 2005, 105–107).

The weakness of the existing parties made it possible for Leguía to concentrate power and act in authoritarian ways. According to Stein (1980, 38), by 1919, all of the major parties in Peru were near collapse: “They resembled the imposing colonial houses still owned by many of their most prominent members; impressive façades that hid aging structures beset by internal decay.” Leguía weakened them further, exiling or imprisoning their leaders, breaking up party meetings, and encouraging mobs to attack opposition newspapers and politicians (Stein 1980, 41).¹⁷ The Civil Party and the Liberal Party bore the brunt of the attacks.¹⁸ Shortly after taking office, Leguía announced that the exiled former president, José Pardo, had organized a movement to carry out a coup and he arrested a number of leaders of the party, along with various army and police officers (Gerlach 1973, 143–144). Pro-Leguía mobs then assaulted two newspapers that were critical of the new president, and when Augusto Durand, the publisher of one of those newspapers, protested, he was sent into exile. Durand later returned to Peru but was arrested and died in prison under mysterious circumstances, which led to the demise of the Liberal Party. Leguía also persecuted new political movements, such as the APRA, whose leader, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, was exiled in 1923. Other parties, such as the Constitutional Party and the Democrat Party, cooperated with Leguía, but they had little influence over him and they, too, dissolved in short order.

Leguía founded his own personalistic party, the PDR, in 1920, but he had no interest in building a strong party organization (Pike 1969, 218). The PDR’s leadership was stacked overwhelmingly with friends and family members of Leguía, and it had no ideology to speak of, existing only to serve the interests of the president (Stein 1980, 47). As a result, it failed to constrain the president in any meaningful way.

The most significant resistance to Leguía came from the military itself. The Leguía administration experienced several military insurrections, plus at least five military conspiracies that never reached fruition, during its first five years in power (Gerlach 1973, 175). Some of these plots and uprisings involved members of the political opposition, but they were led by military officers and involved active-duty troops. None of these plots gained many adherents or posed a serious threat to the regime.¹⁹ In 1930, however, the strong economic growth that had boosted the president’s popularity came to an end, leading to a dramatic increase in unemployment and sharp cuts in government spending. The economic crisis helped prompt a military uprising in Arequipa led by Major Luis M. Sánchez Cerro. The military rebellion quickly spread throughout the country, leading to the overthrow of Leguía who by this time was deeply unpopular. This coup, too, failed to bring democracy to Peru, however.

Thus, the weakness of parties in Peru undermined the prospects for democracy in Peru even after the professionalization of the military brought an end to outsider revolts. Weak opposition parties could not compete effectively in elections, nor could they push through democratic reforms or prevent presidents from concentrating power and manipulating the political and electoral system. Consequently, the opposition frequently abstained from elections and sometimes encouraged the military to intervene. The result was a relatively stable authoritarian regime during the first three decades of the twentieth century, albeit one that experienced a brief period of political instability in the 1910s brought on by military coups.

The Military and Revolts in Brazil

Brazil also had a relatively stable authoritarian regime for much of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Unlike its Spanish-American neighbors, Brazil enjoyed considerable political continuity after independence. The prince regent, Dom Pedro I, who was the son of the Portuguese emperor, led the country’s independence movement, and after declaring its independence in 1822, Brazil remained an empire. Nine years later, Dom Pedro I abdicated in favor of his son, Dom Pedro II, but because Dom Pedro II was only five years old at the time, Brazil was governed through elected regents until 1840 when the Brazilian parliament declared him to be of age to rule. Dom Pedro II then governed Brazil until he was overthrown by the military in 1889.

The Brazilian military was relatively weak in the decades following independence. A scarcity of tax revenue constrained military spending and local powerholders opposed the creation of a strong army partly on the grounds that it might reduce their autonomy (Beattie 2001, 32). Before 1865, the size of the army fluctuated between 12,000 and 25,000 men, which was small given the country’s size (McBeth 1987, 126). To make matters worse, the military was poorly armed. The army had muskets and artillery, but the lance was often the dominant battlefield weapon in the early nineteenth century (Scheina 2003, 151).

The troops, who came overwhelmingly from the poorest sectors of the population, lacked training and discipline. The state forcibly recruited many soldiers – between 1850 and 1861, 57 percent of the army’s troops were impressed – and the conditions in which they served were poor (Beattie 2001, 294). As a result, many troops deserted. The navy, for example, experienced 6,568 desertions between 1836 and 1884 – in some years, 10 percent of its sailors left (Beattie 2001, 192).

The officer class was also woefully inadequate. The country established a military academy in 1810, but it operated sporadically and attendance was not required (Dudley 1978; Nunn 1972, 57). Most officers lacked a military education and owed their positions to personal or political connections rather than merit. Many officers also initially lacked combat experience because the Brazilian independence struggle had only limited fighting.

The initial weakness of the Brazilian military encouraged frequent revolts. As Table 7.3 indicates, Brazil suffered a dozen major revolts between 1831 and 1852. These revolts had a variety of causes and aims, but they were made possible by the Brazilian state’s lack of coercive capacity. Although some of the rebellions were motivated by liberal or republican sentiments, they did not bring about democratization. Instead, the revolts provoked a great deal of violence and state repression, costing tens of thousands of lives. None of these rebellions ever seriously threatened to topple the central government, but the weak Brazilian military had a difficult time suppressing many of them. The national guard, which was developed as a counterweight to the military and grew to include 200,000 men by the 1830s, played an important role in combating some of the regional revolts (Schneider 1993, 41; Scheina 2003, 150). The national guard was even more poorly trained and armed than the military, however. Moreover, national guard troops sometimes joined in the rebellions, fighting against the imperial army (Johnson 1964, 183–184). Members of the army also sometimes participated in the rebellions (Beattie 2001, 33; Kraay 1992).

Table 7.3 Major revolts in Brazil, 1830–1929

Year	Description of revolt	Type of revolt (outcome)
1831	Military sided with popular revolt critical of the emperor and against the Portuguese. Pedro I abdicated in favor of his five-year old son.	Military coup (abdication)
1831	Anti-Portuguese riots continued in some states after the abdication of Pedro I and some called for reform. Some elements of the military joined in. 130 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1832	More than 500 Conservatives (caramuros) carried out an uprising in Rio de Janeiro to restore Pedro I to the throne, but it was quickly suppressed.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1832–1835	War of the Cabanos. A popular revolt in some northern provinces that called for the return of Pedro I and the end of the regency. It was suppressed.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1835–1840	War of the Cabanagem. The poor of Grão-Pará rebelled. Rebel army grew to 25,000 before it was suppressed. 30,000–40,000 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1835	A slave revolt in Salvador, Bahia was brutally suppressed, leading to the deaths of hundreds of slaves. This was the largest slave revolt in Brazilian history.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1835–1845	War of the Farrapos. Landowners in Rio Grande do Sul rebelled against taxes with support of Liberals and Uruguay but were defeated. 3,000–10,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1837–1838	Sabinada. A popular revolt in Salvador that included military and elite elements and grew to 5,000 rebels. The rebels were suppressed. 1,200 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1838–1841	Balaiada. Liberals (bentevis) revolted and assembled an army of 11,000 soldiers, including many slaves, before they were defeated. 30,000 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1842	Liberal Revolutions of 1842. Liberals rebelled in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais against Conservative control but were quickly defeated.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1848	Praiera Revolution. Liberals in Pernambuco revolted against Conservative dominance. The rebels numbered 2,800 but were suppressed. 815 total deaths.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1851–1852	The War of the Wasps. A popular rebellion against the decrees calling for a general census and civil registry. The government suspended the decrees.	Popular uprising (policy revoked)
1889	The military overthrew the emperor and declared Brazil a republic. The coup was nonviolent, but pro-Monarchist reactions led to more than 100 casualties.	Military coup (took power)
1891	The navy under Admiral Cústodio de Mello revolted after President Fonseca declared martial law. Fonseca resigned, leading the vice-president to take over.	Military coup (resignation)
1892	General Antonio Maria Coelho, the former provincial president, declared the Transatlantic Republic of Mato Grosso. The revolt was suppressed.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1893–1894	Naval Revolt of 1893–1894. Admiral Mello unsuccessfully revolted with support of navy after President Floriano Peixoto sought to stay in power. 10,000 deaths.	Military coup (suppressed)
1893–1895	The Federalist Riograndense Revolution. Federalists revolted in Rio Grande do Sul with support of Argentina and Uruguay but were suppressed. 10,000 deaths.	Elite insurrection (suppressed)
1896–1897	The War of the Canudos. A religious community in rural Bahia revolted but were defeated by the federal military. 30,000 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1910	Revolt of the Lash. 2,000 navy sailors mutinied in Rio de Janeiro in response to whippings. A few officers were killed then the sailors surrendered.	Military mutiny (suppressed)
1912–1916	The War of the Contestados. Land disputes prompted a popular uprising led by a monk on the southern frontier. It was suppressed. 6,000–9,000 deaths.	Popular uprising (suppressed)
1922	Junior officers rebelled in Rio in response to the arrest of General Hermes da Fonseca. A few units joined the revolt, but it was suppressed. 18 deaths.	Military coup (suppressed)
1924–1927	Junior officers rebelled and sought to overthrow President Bernardes. They were defeated but some continued a march through the backlands. 1,000 deaths.	Military coup (suppressed)

Source: Latin American Revolts Database.

Beginning in the 1850s, the Brazilian government took some steps to professionalize the military. New military schools were opened in Porto Alegre, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, although instruction continued to be irregular (Nunn 1983, 57–58). Legislation was passed that sought to depoliticize military promotions and gave priority to officers with seniority and degrees (Schneider 1993, 50; Beattie 2001, 36; Castro 2001). Middle-income groups began to enter the military in larger numbers, and favoritism and corruption declined (Beattie 2001, 36).

The bloody Paraguayan War of 1865–1870 led to the further strengthening of the military. Brazil created special battalions called Volunteers of the Fatherland to fight in the war, and the Brazilian army swelled to more than 50,000 men (Scheina 2003, 317; Loveman 1999, 51; Beattie 2001, 39–41). Ultimately, Brazil deployed more than 110,000 men in the war, including national guard troops and many freed slaves (Beattie 2001, 38–41). Brazil also invested heavily in modern weaponry during the war, purchasing ironclad ships, artillery, and repeating rifles (Scheina 2003, 318; Loveman 1999, 51). Nevertheless, Brazil and its allies struggled to defeat the much smaller forces of Paraguay, and suffered an estimated 100,000 casualties (Scheina 2003, 331).

The poor performance of the army in this war led Brazilian officers to push the government to further modernize the military, but the emperor and allied elites were reluctant to invest heavily in the armed forces (Nunn 1972, 31; Dudley 1978, 59–61). Some reform measures were enacted in 1873–1874. The government overhauled the military curriculum, created provincial police forces, and established a military conscription lottery to replace the existing system of impressment (Schneider 1993, 55; Beattie 1999, 857). Yet implementation of the latter system was delayed until 1916, and regional divisions continued to bedevil the army, which barely kept pace with the evolution of doctrine, strategy, and tactics (Nunn 1983, 58–59; Mendes 2010). A politician in the 1880s quipped that the army was “more apt, by its organization, background and education, for police service than for duties of war” (Graham 1990, 63). In addition, the size of the army steadily declined in the wake of the war, dropping to 19,000 in 1871 and 13,000 in 1889 (Nunn 1983, 61). To make matters worse, promotions were slow and military pay and budgets stagnated in the postwar period (Dudley 1975, 45). In 1887, army officers had gone thirty-five years without an increase in their base pay, and the military budget was the same from 1870 to 1880 as it had been in 1857 (Dudley 1975, 56–57; Schneider 1993, 57).

Frustration with military salaries, budgets, and promotions as well as the lack of reform helped lead the military to overthrow the emperor in 1889, establishing the First Republic. Internal divisions, including revolts by the navy between 1891–1894, spurred the military to yield the presidency to an elected civilian leader in 1894, but while in power, the military boosted the pay and promotions of officers and opened some new military schools (Beattie 1999, 862; McCann 2004, 79–80; Johnson 1964, 193; Hahner 1969). Nevertheless, at the end of the century, the military curriculum was still woefully out of date (McCann 2004, 90, 93–94). A 1907 report by the minister of war, Hermes da Fonseca, concluded that the army was “deficient in personnel, war materiel, organization and command” (McCann 2004, 97). As McCann (2004, 70) puts it, Brazilian generals were “not prepared to lead, [and] the soldiers were likewise unfit to follow.”

It was not until the early twentieth century that Brazil took major steps to professionalize the military, although even then they proceeded slowly and haphazardly. Brazil’s military professionalization efforts of the early twentieth century were driven in part by concern about the growing military buildup in Argentina (McCann 2004, 100; Resende-Santos 2007, 246, 286–294), but they were made possible by the strong economic growth Brazil experienced in the early twentieth century. Between 1913 and 1929 alone, exports increased by 7.8 percent annually in real terms and the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.2 percent (Bértola and Ocampo 2013, 100). The export revenues helped fund the expansion and strengthening of the armed forces.

Germany played an important role in the initial professionalization efforts. Brazil sent thirty-four junior officers to be trained in Germany between 1906 and 1910, and it purchased several hundred thousand Mauser rifles as well as Krupp cannons from the Germans (McCann 1984, 746; Nunn 1972, 35; Resende-Santos 2007, 252–253). The military professionalization efforts, however, met resistance from within the military as well as from powerful state political elites who opposed strengthening the coercive powers of the federal government (Resende-Santos 2007, 275–276). Military officers, for example, blocked an effort to hire a full-scale German mission both for nationalistic reasons and concerns about how it would affect their own standing (Resende-Santos 2007, 261–262; Grauer 2015, 294–295).

World War I brought an end to military cooperation with Germany, but after the war Brazil commissioned a French mission, which ultimately had greater success in professionalizing the military. The French mission, which lasted from 1920 to 1940 and numbered around thirty officers annually, took over the training of military officers, establishing new schools and overhauling the curriculum of existing ones. Under their auspices, Brazil passed a law in 1934 that established strict meritocratic criteria for military promotions (Resende-Santos 2007, 272). Brazil also gradually expanded the size of the military, which grew from 30,000 men in 1920 to 50,000 in 1930 and 93,000 in 1940 (McCann 2004, 176). Brazilian arms purchases, however, remained relatively modest, as budget considerations forced the military to abandon some planned acquisitions (Resende-Santos 2007, 268). Moreover, it took time for the impact of the French mission on the training of officers and troops to take effect.

The gradual modernization of the military brought down the frequency of rebellions in Brazil. The number of revolts dropped precipitously beginning in the 1850s, although this decline probably stemmed more from Emperor Pedro II’s popularity and governing skills than the strength of the military. Revolts ticked up again after the overthrow of the emperor in 1889, but most of these revolts were military uprisings. As Table 7.3 indicates, major military coups or mutinies took place in 1891, 1892, 1893, 1910, 1922, and 1924. The revolts of the early 1890s reflected a struggle for power that occurred in the wake of the overthrow of the emperor, but the military revolts of the 1920s stemmed from the rise of a group of reformist junior officers, known as tenentes, who wanted sweeping military and political changes (Alexander 1956; Wirth 1964). Opposition parties and politicians at times encouraged these coup attempts since they had little possibility of dislodging the government through elections.

A few major outsider revolts also occurred during this period, including the Federalist Riograndense Rebellion of 1893–1895, the War of the Canudos of 1896–1897, and the War of the Contestados of 1912–1916. These revolts, like the rebellions of the early nineteenth century, had a variety of causes, but they took advantage of the vast size and rugged nature of Brazil’s territory, the federalist structure of the country, and the continued weakness of the Brazilian state and the military (Resende-Santos 2007, 275). Even in the early twentieth century, the Brazilian state barely penetrated the interior. Many areas lacked roads, bridges, telegraph lines, and electricity, which made it difficult for the military to suppress the rebellions. In the War of the Contestados, for example, 20,000 poorly armed and untrained rebels held off the Brazilian army for years in a remote area of southern Brazil (Diacon 1995). These internal wars not only cost thousands of lives, they also prompted authoritarian measures by the government.

The most politically consequential revolt, however, took place in 1930 when the political opposition managed to topple the government. The revolt occurred after the opposition candidate, Getulio Vargas, denounced the widespread fraud in the 1930 presidential election. Vargas and his allies managed to mobilize discontented military officers as well as members of the state militias, policemen, firemen, and irregular forces throughout much of Brazil (Wirth 1964, 168). State militias represented a particularly important source of troops for the rebels since some of these state militias were larger and better armed than the federal military garrisons. The military leadership initially opposed this rebellion and over several weeks the federal military fought a series of battles with the rebels (McCann 2004). As the rebels gathered strength, however, the military leadership switched sides, asking the president to step down and recognizing Vargas as the new president.

In the years that followed, the military gradually strengthened its coercive capacity, which led opposition groups to abandon the armed struggle. The last major opposition revolt occurred in 1932, when opposition groups in São Paulo revolted against Vargas with the support of state militias and police, along with some rebellious army troops. Although the rebels managed to assemble an army of 40,000 troops, more than half of them were civilian volunteers and they were a poor match for the army’s 75,000 troops, which suppressed the rebellion after a few months of fighting (Schneider 1993, 124). In the wake of this rebellion, the military for the first time in its history gained a monopoly on force throughout the country (McCann 2004, 331). Although elements within the military continued to engage in periodic uprisings and coup attempts, the opposition began to increasingly focus on the electoral path to power.

Thus, the gradual strengthening of the Brazilian military during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century slowly brought an end to the outsider revolts that had plagued Brazil during the early nineteenth century. Although Brazil did not professionalize its military as rapidly or as thoroughly as Argentina and Chile, it nevertheless gradually obtained a monopoly on violence, which helped bring about a degree of political stability.²⁰

Weak Parties and Authoritarian Rule in Brazil

Military professionalization and the decline of outsider revolts did not bring democracy to Brazil. Government electoral intervention and military coup attempts persisted throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in large part because of the weakness of parties in Brazil.

As Chapter 4 discussed, Brazil failed to develop strong parties in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. The Conservative Party and the Liberal Party dominated Brazilian politics for most of the nineteenth century, but neither of these parties developed significant organizational structures, consistent political positions, or enduring partisan loyalties.²¹ The Conservatives never even developed a written party program and the Liberal Party did not formulate one until the late nineteenth century (Carvalho 1974, 426; Motta 1971, 2–3; Needell 2001).

The two parties arose during the 1830s and rotated in power until 1889, except for a brief period between 1853 and 1868 when they governed jointly.²² The parties had relatively similar social bases, in that both were led by and represented the landowning elites, but the Liberal Party had more professionals among its leaders, whereas the Conservative Party had more government bureaucrats (Carvalho 1974, 440–442). Although they often disagreed, neither party had stable ideologies (Costa 1989, 198; Graham 1990, 169–175, 181).²³ Both Conservatives and Liberals criticized the emperor and demanded democracy when they were out of power but did little to reform the system that benefited them once they were in power (Graham 1990, 97).

Personalistic and patronage-based ties, rather than ideological or programmatic linkages, undergirded the party system. Neither party developed a strong territorial organization, depending instead on local political bosses (coroneis) to turn out the votes at the local level (Barman 1988; Nunes Leal 1977; Graham 1990). These local bosses focused on patronage and they would typically side with the governing party in order to gain access to resources (Barman 1988, 226; Graham 1990, 156–159). Factionalism was pervasive in both parties, and party loyalty and discipline were sorely lacking – politicians switched parties as well as policy positions at their convenience (Barman 1988, 228–229; Graham 1989, 145; 1990, 161). According to Graham (1990, 181): “Party labels were put on and taken off almost as easily as a set of clothes.”

The weakness of parties meant that the opposition could not compete in elections since they had neither the organization nor the partisan attachments required to prevail under adverse circumstances. Whoever was in power controlled elections through patronage, fraud, and intimidation. The cabinet appointed and could remove provincial presidents and judges, both of whom held great sway over the electoral process (Graham 1990, 81–85; Carvalho 2012, 15). The cabinet also named the leaders of the military, the police, and the national guard, all of which could be used to intimidate voters, especially given that the vote was not secret (Graham 1990, 85–93; Carvalho 2012, 15).

The governing party invariably won the vast majority of seats in the legislature. Liberals, for example, captured only one of the 110 seats elected in 1849 when the Conservatives were in control, but the Liberals won all 122 seats in 1878, when they were the ruling party (Carvalho 2012, 12–14; Porto 1989, 134–135).²⁴ As a member of the cabinet noted in an 1852 letter to a friend: “We defeated them completely because we’re in the government; if they were in the government, they would have won completely … That is the system” (cited in Graham 1990, 80).

Nevertheless, the opposition could come to power if the emperor desired it, since he had extensive powers, including the right to suspend judges, to name and dismiss ministers, to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies, and to choose senators-for-life from lists of three candidates nominated by provincial electors (Schneider 1993, 45). On eleven occasions during the nineteenth century, the emperor dissolved the cabinet and called new elections for the Chamber of Deputies. The emperor alternated between the two main parties for diverse reasons, including to get rid of unpopular governments and to enact policy reforms. These interventions were hardly democratic, however, since the emperor used authoritarian methods to ensure that the party he favored won. Nevertheless, the emperor’s interventions ensured some degree of alternation in government. Indeed, between 1840 and 1889, Conservatives governed for twenty-six years and Liberals ruled for over thirteen years, whereas the two parties governed jointly in an alliance for almost ten years (Carvalho 1974, 434).

The opposition frequently called for democratic reforms, but they did not have the legislative strength to enact the measures themselves. To pass reforms they needed the support of the emperor and at least some members of the ruling party. Although electoral reforms were enacted in 1842, 1846, 1855, 1860, and 1875, they were mostly minor measures that failed to bring an end to government manipulation of the electoral system. As Costa (1989, 173) argues, the electoral reforms of this period did not touch the sources of patronage or address the economic inequalities that undergirded the political system, nor did it guarantee the independence of electors. The 1855 reform did ban public employees from running for elected positions in their jurisdictions, which reduced the number of government officials in the legislature (Carvalho 2012, 10–13; Graham 1989, 147). This reform also created single-member districts for electing federal legislators, which enabled the opposition to win more seats, but in 1860 this system was replaced with districts that elected three members by simple majority (Carvalho 2012, 13). In 1875, the government made further changes, introducing an incomplete-list system, which was supposed to grant one-third of the seats to the opposition, but it failed to prevent the Liberals from winning all the seats in the 1878 elections (Carvalho 2012, 14; Graham 1990, 76).

The most important electoral reform was enacted in 1881, but it had, at best, a mixed effect on democracy in Brazil. The 1881 reform created direct parliamentary elections, which reduced government electoral control and helped increase opposition representation in the legislature (Carvalho 1974, 456; Costa 1989, 195–196). At the same time, however, the 1881 reform restricted the suffrage by imposing a literacy requirement for the first time, and by requiring written documents to prove that voters met the existing income requirements.²⁵ These restrictions dramatically reduced voter registration and turnout in Brazil. In the 1870s, approximately 10 percent of the total population had been eligible to vote, which was one of the highest rates in Latin America, but this dropped to 1.2 percent in 1881, before recovering to 6.7 percent in 1894. Voter turnout, meanwhile, declined from 8.6 percent in 1872 to 0.8 percent in 1881 and 1886, before rising to 2.3 percent in 1894.

The opposition revolted on a few occasions in the early nineteenth century to protest the unfairness of elections and the lack of democracy. In 1842, for example, liberals rebelled in São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Rio de Janeiro partly in response to efforts by Conservatives to consolidate their dominance by appointing police delegates to the electoral boards that supervised voting (Graham 1990, 53; Bethell and Carvalho 1989, 81–83; Bento and Giorgis 2016, 171–176). Similarly, in 1848 Liberals in Pernambuco revolted against Conservative efforts to dismantle their political base – the Liberals called for federalism, free and universal suffrage, and the elimination of the emperor’s moderating powers, among other demands (Bethell and Carvalho 1989, 104–105; Bento and Giorgis 2016, 179–183). As we have seen, however, the gradual strengthening of the military in the late nineteenth century discouraged opposition revolts. Moreover, Pedro II dissuaded the opposition from revolting by allowing both the Conservatives and Liberals to govern at different times, giving both parties a stake in the existing system (Graham 1990, 78).

Nevertheless, opposition discontent with the authoritarian political system grew steadily over time, helping lead to the overthrow of the emperor. In the 1870s, Republican parties, which opposed the monarchy and called for representative government and federalism, emerged in some states. Most Republican leaders adopted a gradual, democratic approach to achieving their goals, but some of them conspired with the military to topple the emperor and declare Brazil a republic in 1889 (Costa 1989, 206–212). Military leaders initially governed Brazil in the aftermath of the coup, but the military was divided and soon handed power back to civilian leaders. In 1894, Brazil elected Prudente de Morais of the Paulista Republican Party as its first civilian president.

The overthrow of the empire did not bring democracy to Brazil, in part because parties continued to be weak during the First Republic (1889–1930). After the fall of the empire, the Liberal and Conservative parties disappeared, but no strong national parties emerged to replace them. Some states, such as São Paulo and Minas Gerais, developed strong state-level Republican parties, which routinely delivered a large share of the state vote for their candidates, but they had a minimal presence outside of their home states (Love 1970, 13; 1980; Wirth 1977).²⁶ Although there were periodic attempts to create a national party based on coalitions of state parties, none of these national parties lasted more than a few years (Love 1970, 15). In 1910, for example, Rio Grande do Sul and some northeastern states created the Conservative Republican Party, but it failed to develop a meaningful organization, common platform, or national following and it rapidly declined after 1916 (Fausto 1989, 292; Schneider 1993, 92–93). Another party, the Democratic Party, arose in 1926 and built support within the middle classes with its calls for democratic reform, but it failed to move beyond its base in São Paulo and dissolved in 1934 (Fausto 1989, 297–298).

As a result of their organizational weakness, the opposition usually could not compete effectively in elections since opposition candidates and parties typically lacked the resources and partisan ties to overcome the electoral disadvantages they faced. Presidential elections were held regularly every four years beginning in 1894, but the presidential races rarely had serious competition. Indeed, between 1894 and 1930, the winning presidential candidate captured an average of 82 percent of the vote. The Republican parties of the two largest states, São Paulo and Minas Gerais, generally traded control of the presidency in what became known as the café com leite alliance.²⁷ Leaders of the Paulista Republican Party won the presidency six times during the First Republic, whereas representatives of the Mineiro Republican Party held it three times (Fausto 1989, 272). The Republican parties of these two states would usually reach an accord on who their joint presidential candidate should be and the other states would typically fall into line. This meant there was little competition in the presidential race since the governors and the ruling parties could deliver the votes in their states. In 1910 and 1930, however, São Paulo and Minas Gerais failed to come to an agreement on a candidate, which prompted competitive races in those years as some states sided with São Paulo and others with Minas Gerais. The 1922 presidential election was also competitive, but in this case, São Paulo and Minas Gerais did reach an agreement on a candidate. However, an unprecedented coalition of almost all the other states supported another candidate who lost in a competitive race that year.

Even when they were competitive, the elections were not free and fair. Governors and ruling parties used their control of patronage and the electoral authorities to favor the candidates they supported, so whichever side controlled a particular state would typically dominate elections there.²⁸ According to Schneider (1993, 92), governors used “electoral corruption that bordered on the absurd, rather than being merely abusive.” Ruling parties had influence over all stages of the electoral process. They typically controlled the voter registration process, which enabled them to distribute voter identification cards only to their supporters (Ricci and Zulini 2016, 254). Parties used patronage and clientelism to buy votes and thugs to intimidate the opposition. They also sought to control the committees that oversaw the voting process on election day so they could “count votes their way” (Ricci and Zulini 2016, 256; Nicolau 2012, 68–69). Fraud was a last resort, but it, too, was used, especially where the ruling parties did not have complete control over the electoral authorities (Ricci and Zulini 2016, 247–248; Telarolli 1982).

The opposition pushed for democratic reforms, including the secret ballot, but it lacked the legislative votes to enact significant measures. The opposition candidate Rui Barbosa, for example, made democratic principles and the adoption of the secret ballot a central part of his platform in the 1910 presidential campaign, but to little effect (Fausto 1989, 294; Telarolli 1982, 68–69).²⁹ During the First Republic, the government typically controlled at least two-thirds of the seats in the lower chamber and a similar proportion in the Senate, which made it impossible for the opposition to enact legislation without the support of members of the ruling party.³⁰ As a result, there were no major changes in the voting process during the First Republic (Nicolau 2012, 66). The government did pass an electoral reform in 1916, which shifted the responsibility of registering voters to state judges, but this simply led parties to focus on gaining influence over the judges (Ricci and Zulini 2016, 253). The 1916 reform also shifted the electoral scrutiny process to the capital of each state, instead of the capital of each district, but this gave the governor more influence over the process (Ricci and Zulini 2016, 263).

Because the opposition could not capture the presidency through elections, it sometimes urged the military to intervene. The opposition, for example, initially refused to accept its loss in the 1922 presidential elections and demanded that the military step in. Field Marshall Hermes da Fonseca, the head of the Military Club, supported the opposition candidate and called for a Tribunal of Honor to verify the results instead of the Chamber of Deputies. Fonseca also sent a threatening telegram to federal garrisons in the state of Pernambuco advocating passive resistance to the government, which led to his arrest for insubordination (McCann 2004, 262–263). In the wake of his arrest, some junior officers carried out a revolt at Fort Copabacana in Rio de Janeiro. Although this revolt was quickly suppressed, it inspired another larger revolt by reformist junior officers in 1924 that culminated in a 15,000-mile rebel march through Brazil that lasted three years. The rebels, who were led by Captain Luis Carlos Prestes, demanded a series of reforms, including the adoption of the secret ballot.

The most important opposition revolt, however, occurred in the wake of the 1930 presidential election. As noted, the opposition candidate, Getulio Vargas, and his supporters denounced the election as fraudulent and refused to accept their defeat.³¹ Indeed, there was extensive evidence of fraud by both sides. Shortly after the election, Vargas’ running mate, João Pessoa, who was the governor of the state of Paraíba, was murdered. Although his killing was unrelated to the election, it triggered a revolt. The rebels initially received the support of some reformist junior officers as well as the state militia of Rio Grande do Sul where Vargas was the governor, but others quickly joined the cause, enabling the rebels to seize areas of the northeast as well as Minas Gerais. Senior military officers in Rio de Janeiro then deposed the president, but their efforts to maintain power themselves failed in the face of the growing rebel opposition and they agreed to allow Vargas to assume power, which he did in November 1930. Democracy failed to emerge in the years that followed, however, as Vargas gradually consolidated his control of the country.

Thus, Brazil remained an authoritarian regime throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century in part because of the weakness of the country’s parties. Opposition parties were not strong enough to compete in elections, to resist government electoral manipulation, or to enact meaningful democratic reform. Instead, members of the opposition at times resorted to revolts or urged the military to intervene on their behalf. The modernization of the country’s armed forces in the late nineteenth century discouraged opposition revolts and created a more stable authoritarian regime, but the military itself began to intervene increasingly in politics beginning in 1889, at times undermining the relative stability of the country’s authoritarian system.

Conclusion

Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela had similar regime trajectories during the nineteenth and early twentieth century in large part because they all strengthened their militaries considerably over time. All three countries were plagued by frequent revolts in the nineteenth century, which sometimes toppled governments and often provoked state repression. The professionalization of the countries’ armed forces in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century helped reduce the frequency of these revolts, leading to the establishment of relatively stable authoritarian regimes. Parties remained weak in all three countries, however, which impeded the emergence of democracy. Opposition parties did not have the organizational strength or partisan ties necessary to win elections or democratize the countries’ electoral systems. Nor could they always prevent presidents from concentrating authority or extending their hold on power. Instead, the opposition often abstained from elections and sometimes called on the military to intervene. As a result, in 1930, the three countries were still firmly under authoritarian rule.

Although the regime trajectories of Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela were similar in some ways during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, they also had important differences. For most of the nineteenth century, Brazil had an emperor, and it took steps to professionalize its military at an earlier stage than did Peru or Venezuela. As a result, Brazil enjoyed greater political stability than Peru or Venezuela during the late nineteenth century. Although Peru and Venezuela professionalized their militaries and developed relatively stable authoritarian regimes in the early twentieth century, their regimes took a different form than in Brazil. Personalistic regimes emerged in Venezuela and, subsequently, in Peru that rewrote constitutions, concentrated authority, and extended the president’s hold on power. By contrast in Brazil, presidents largely respected constitutional rule, leaving office after their terms expired. Thus, authoritarian rule in Brazil during the early twentieth century was less dictatorial and exclusionary than it was in Peru or Venezuela.