During the Cold War, dozens of military governments existed in South America. Some lasted only days or weeks, while others lasted years and even decades. The human rights abuses carried out by these military governments have been well analysed, like Argentina’s Dirty War. However, an interesting fact about this period tends to be ignored: inter-state warfare between South American states, even during military governments, was very scarce. The Falklands / Malvinas war is the only case of a South American military government, Argentina, beginning a war against another state, the United Kingdom. There were other incidents that could have caused inter-state warfare during this era, but war was avoided. The only other inter-state war during the Cold War in South America happened in 1981 between Ecuador and Peru, both being under civilian rule. There were (and still are) reasons for South American states to attack one another, particularly to regain lost or disputed territory; however, as this essay demonstrates, war was almost non-existent. This essay will discuss why South American military governments did not attack their neighbours during this turbulent period.

The purpose of this work is to analyze the particular forms of government that arise under conditions of dependent capitalism. The author analyzes the features of the uneven development of dependent countries and suggests that in such countries a special form of development of capitalism has formed. As a theoretical basis, the author uses the Marxist theory of dependence. As a result of the study, the author concludes that a form of government in dependent states brings about conditions in which national resources and capital flow to developed capitalist countries. As a result dependent countries lose part of their sovereignty, and an authoritarian political regime based on the working class becomes a necessary condition for maintaining dependence on the capitalist center.

From 1932 onwards, with the arrival of the presidency of the Council of Portugal, António Oliveira Salazar created a new regime of civil dictatorship, which had both similarities and differences with the fascist regime in Italy and the National Socialist regime in Germany. The main similarity of these political regimes was the aggressive activity of the secret state police. In this study, the author will try, in its first part, to make a comparative study between the PVDE (Polícia de Vigilância e Defesa do Estado - State Surveillance and Defense Police, 1933-1945) and the political police apparatus of fascist Italy, nationalsocialist Germany and Franco’s dictatorship in Spain during World War II. With the defeat of Fascism and Nazism, two dictatorial regimes remained in the Iberian Peninsula, whose political police were related to each other. In a second part of this article the author compares Portuguese PIDE (Polícia Internacional de Defesa do Estado - Portuguese International Police, 1945-1969) and later DGS (Drirecção-Geral de Segurança - Directorate-General of Security, 1969-1974), on the one hand, and Spanish Seguridad (Dirección-General de Seguridad - Directorate-General for Security), on the other.

In Argentina, the 1976 coup d’état was a change of political regime and not just a change of government, from one of democratic origin turned authoritarian to another with fascistic tendencies, since the constant amplification of the State of exception will constitute a structure of state power of fascist projection, whose central characteristics were the expansion of the repressive apparatus and the institutionalization of new branches of the State: the Detention and Extermination Centers and the Task Forces. The character of the regime, however, had a dense sedimentation that combined a complex axiology. The notion of exceptionality allows us to elaborate the problem from a stage prior to State terrorism and to observe how legal and political statutes, for example the exception, secrecy, and military intelligence in a framework of severe capitalist crisis, derived in authoritarian forms of democratic regime and were generating the conditions for the coup d’état. Once the last dictatorship occurred, the concept of exception gave us access to correlate the repressive model with the characteristics of the political regime.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how Argentine experience of internal repression was passed on to Paraguay as a result of the meetings between its intelligence services. The meetings were carried out by the military in the 1970s, aiming at joint operations of political persecution and extermination of the opponents of the dictatorships that prevailed in these two countries. The author analyzes documentation transmitted during the meeting called IIda Regional Bilateral Meeting of Intelligence between Paraguay and Argentina in 1978. Documentation reports to the Paraguayan military the strategies and tactics of war developed by the Argentine armed forces in the so-called Operation Toba. The importance of discussing Operation Toba is to demonstrate the similarity of the repressions that took place in other countries of the Southern Cone. The techniques and tactics used illustrate that such massacres have repressive synchrony and are consistent with a single internationalized process of repression. Although the repression called Operation Toba was developed only by the Argentine State, it demonstrates an international chain of repression, as well as the similarity in the modus operandi of the precepts of the widespread Counter-Revolutionary War Doctrine, developed by the French during the fighting in Indochina and Algeria in the 1950s.

The purpose of this article is to analyze the functioning of the public administration of the Chilean dictatorial State between 1973 and 1990. Specifically, based on a methodology based on a series of testimonies of civilian and military officials of the de facto government, the aim is to reconstruct the bureaucracy of the period, especially that of the first lines of command of ministries, undersecretaries and service chiefs. It is proposed that the classic Weberian bureaucratic model that had marked the public administration of the Chilean State had to be related to a new form of public management, coming from the private sphere. Thus, in order to neoliberalize the State, the authorities had to be able to reorient their classic strategic objectives towards the fulfillment of goals by results. Therefore, the new public official that emerged under the dictatorship was a technopolitician who, as a civilian, contributed his organizational culture based on expert knowledge learned in his business and/or academic spheres, as well as the military who, under his authoritarian hierarchical culture, reinforced the traditional way of exercising power within the state institutionality. Both organizational cultures were necessary in order to instrumentalize, through reason and force, the legitimizing principles underpinning neoliberalism.

The article examines key vectors of the development of Russia’s foreign economic relations with its largest trading partners in Latin America in the context of anti-Russian sanctions. The author analyzes peculiarities of Russia’s foreign trade and investment cooperation with Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico and Chile. Factors hindering the development of this cooperation are economic instability in the world, anti-Russian sanctions, weak development of logistics networks, lack of free trade agreements, the presence of high custom duties on Russian products in the Latin American market, high competition on part of the United States and China, insufficient interest of Russian business in economic cooperation with the countries of the region over the past decades. It is shown that the largest increase in Russia’s trade turnover with the countries under consideration was recorded with Mexico, an increase in Russian exports was observed in Argentina, and imports - from Mexico. Chile demonstrated the worst indicators in the sphere of foreign trade relations among the countries under consideration. It is concluded that Russia’s largest Latin American partners have serious prospects for expanding their presence on the Russian market in the face of anti-Russian sanctions. Two key factors can be considered favorable for further development of Russia - Latin America trade cooperation. The first one is the orientation of the foreign policy of many countries in the region to other economic partners in order to minimize dependence on the United States. The second one is that Russia is shifting its vectors of economic cooperation from unfriendly countries to other countries, including Latin American states. It is concluded that investment cooperation between the countries has certain prospects for development, especially in the field of oil and gas exploration, energy and railway construction.

40 years ago, on April 2, 1982, Argentina made a failed attempt by military means to establish sovereignty over the archipelago in the South Atlantic, which was under the jurisdiction of Great Britain. The war was the result of a two-century dispute over the ownership of the islands. Upon joining the UN in 1945, Buenos Aires loudly announced its claims to the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) and began to seek from the international community to recognize its claims as legitimate. Since then, the problem has been a red thread through the history of the country. The policy of the Argentine authorities on the issue of disputed territories developed with a pendulum dynamic. Periods of de-escalation of the conflict and the development of cooperation with Great Britain, coupled with a friendly attitude towards the islanders, were replaced by phases of the dominance of irreconcilable discourse with a strong demand for the “termination of the colonization policy” by the British authorities. Relations between Argentina and Great Britain after the end of hostilities can be divided into several stages. Regardless of the direction of the course of the next government, the issue of sovereignty over disputed territories has never been removed from the agenda. The Argentine side certainly used the “Malvinas question” as an instrument of domestic policy. Currently, the conflict is in a latent phase with no prospect of an early resolution.

This research is part of a larger study aimed at reconstructing the various ways in which professional historiography and other non-academic historical discourses have dealt with the relationship between Science and Peronism in contemporary Argentina. The purpose of this study is to analyze the overly simplistic image of this relationship that still persists in social memory and, to a large extent, continues to influence historical research agendas and the more general political debate. The article provides a bibliographic review and offers a reading key, useful for future research agendas, in which the history of science and that of Peronism intersects, coming from both professional historiography and of the disciplinary histories many times rehearsed by the scientific community itself. These investigations cover a multitude of topics, but for reasons of space and focus, we will focus here mainly on those disciplines that, broadly speaking, we could encompass within the “exact and natural sciences” and engineering. Based on these considerations, it is possible to observe that this field of study still reproduces a set of stereotypes that limit historical knowledge about the period, both with regard to the insertion of Peronism in a long-term reading of state policies in science and technology, as in its insertion in the history of the university in Argentina.

Unlike most Latin American nations, Argentina experienced a situation of partisan political stability in a context of consistently deteriorating macroeconomic conditions. Other countries in the region, meanwhile, have suffered profound crises and political transformations with notable stability in macroeconomic indicators. That is why the article investigates the causes of this paradox experienced by Argentina and aims to identify the causes of this institutional political stability that is maintained despite the macroeconomic disorder, the strong polarization and the deterioration of the social situation. To carry out this task, the article details the situation of the countries of the region based on the study of various economic indicators and then describes the political and economic situation in Argentina.

This paper analyzes the evolution of the Argentine gross domestic product between 1875-2010. It intends to analyze its trajectory over time according to the periods of greater or lesser economic integration that the country experienced. An explanation of the poor performance that occurs between 1970-2010 (second globalization) is presented and compared with the period 1885-1914 (first globalization). This paper presents a series of graphic arguments that will allow us to analyze the evolution of the Argentine gross product from 1885 to 2010. It is not intended to explain or investigate the specific causes or reasons for the prosperity or depression that Argentina experienced in each of its episodes. Instead, an attempt is made to present longterm stylized facts seeking to compare moments of opening versus those of a closed economy over which the country oscillated in order to analyze long-term growth and economic volatility.