Little more than 30 years ago there was still the board in Buenos Aires; 10 years ago died Pinochet, head of the Chilean armed forces just 8 years before. In Brazil, to which Paolo Rossi made the hat-trick in the 82, the military commanded. At that time there was still Meza in Bolivia, the last general-president. The same applies to Uruguay, where colonels were in command until the 1984. General Stroessner in Paraguay would have resisted even up to the 1989.
There is nothing to say: the wind of the '68 in South America has arrived late. A slight delay of 40 years with which generals and colonels, when they did not end up in court, went to the attic.
On balance, the only exception is Venezuela. The Republic Bolivarian of Chavez remained for a while the last example of presidentialism in uniform, although abandoned. In uniform from parà precisely, that of 422° Batallón Briceño of 42 ° Brigada de Infanteria Paracaidista.
It is worth clarifying.
Much work has been done to identify the diversity of Chavez with respect to the "with boots" of South America years '70 and' 80. Chavez was loved by the red squares here in the West. With its antagonism, its rhetoric guevariana, his uncomfortable alliances, calling him a dictator had become an effort for many enlightened.
In reality the Bolivarianismo, self-referenced form of a vague concept of socialism, has always been ideologically transversal. With all due respect to those who wanted to make it an exclusive myth, the strong Catholic connotation of Venezuelan society obliged it to a clear detachment from the forms of real atheist and Marxist socialism to which one is accustomed in Europe and in the world.
Indeed, the strong presence of the state in the economy made the military power of Caracas closer to Videla's defunct Argentina, than Argentina itself was to Pinochet's Chile, a liberal and anglophile forever. In other words, the Latin authoritarianisms overlapped and distanced themselves far beyond the official color of the flags.
But remembering it today is of little use. What matters of Chavismo is that he was loved by half the population and hated by the other, a phenomenon typical of South American social dualisms, two hundred years old.
Chavez's system for better or for worse was an exception. Although inserted into the aura of a Third World populism, with often provocative ethnic traits, he was not immune to the authoritarian and coup militarism so hated by the progressive South American presidents of the last 20 years. Despite being an enemy of "colonial imperialisms" he had never entered the "sixty eighty" trail that had taken root so quickly in South America. In many respects it was the exact opposite of Lula or Roussef in Brazil; of Correa in Ecuador, of Morales in Bolivia, of José Mujica in Uruguay. The same progressive wing of Peronism pursued by the questionable Kirchner in Argentina concerned him up to a certain point.
Now that the useless and harmful Maduro has fallen in Venezuela, the music changes and Venezuela returns among the "normal" countries. Ironically, just now that the wind in South America has changed again.
How good and how bad it is difficult to say in a continent strategically destined to remain periphery. Not even the end of the fake Argentine peronism and the victory of Macri can be very helpful.
No longer authoritarian, no longer a workshop of ideologies ... If South America without stars is a true democracy or an appendix to global markets, we will only find out by living.
(photo: Ejército Bolivariano)
