Research Catalog

Authoritarian El Salvador : politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940

Title
Authoritarian El Salvador : politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940 / Erik Ching.
Author
Ching, Erik Kristofer
Publication
Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2014]

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TextUse in library JFE 14-2547Schwarzman Building - Main Reading Room 315

Details

Additional Authors
Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Description
xvii, 459 pages : maps; 23 cm.
Summary
"In December 1931, El Salvador's civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation's first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war. In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador's national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years. "With his Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching makes a significant and original contribution to the historiography of Central America and to debates on patron-client relations and systems of political development. No doubt the enormous empirical research and attention to archival detail he presents will spark debate in the rich and growing literature on politics, democracy, and authoritarianism in post-independence Latin America." --Justin Wolfe, Tulane University"--
Series Statement
From the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Subjects
Genre/Form
History.
Note
  • "Recent titles from the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies"
Bibliography (note)
  • Includes bibliographical references (pages 437-452) and index.
Call Number
JFE 14-2547
ISBN
  • 9780268023751 (pbk.)
  • 0268023751 (pbk.)
LCCN
2013030743
OCLC
842209330
Author
Ching, Erik Kristofer, author.
Title
Authoritarian El Salvador : politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940 / Erik Ching.
Publisher
Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2014]
Type of Content
text
Type of Medium
unmediated
Type of Carrier
volume
Series
From the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 437-452) and index.
Chronological Term
1838 - 1999
Added Author
Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Research Call Number
JFE 14-2547
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