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Since its return to democracy, Argentina has made great efforts to address the legacy of the last military dictatorship. This paper presents a complete overview of the Argentinean policy of economic reparations for the victims of human rights violations committed between 1975-1983, including the beneficiaries, the crimes for which victims received reparations, the amounts paid, and the forms of payment. It analyzes the motivations for redressing the victims, from both national and international perspectives. It identifies the positions adopted by the different actors involved in the measures, especially the State and human rights organizations. The latter gained undeniable legitimacy by representing the victims and has consolidated into a group that has become the main actor on issues related to the legacy of the military dictatorship. The paper also focuses on economic, legal, and political questions that have arisen during the process of designing and implementing the reparation policy.

This chapter examines how organizations representing nobles, landowners, and officers were forging greater links by August 1917, uniting with industrialists, politicians, and the clergy to form a recognizable ‘conservative movement’. This movement was united in its calls for a ‘strong government’, which fuelled growing popular fears of imminent counter‐revolution. Yet, this chapter argues, despite having an obvious figurehead in General Kornilov, and elements pressing for a military dictatorship, elites continued to have different visions of Russia's future government. In particular, doubts over the viability and desirability of a military dictatorship made the failure of Kornilov's revolt at the end of August inevitable. Nevertheless, for ordinary Russians, the revolt demonstrated the real threat posed by counter‐revolutionary forces and led to an aggressive reaction against officers and other elites, making it difficult for them to maintain their activities in subsequent months.

After a long silence, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Ligas Camponesas resurfaced to critique the dictatorship and demand re-democratization in Brazil. The chapter analyzes how the Ligas Camponesas and the struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were recalled in oral histories and memoirs produced during Brazil’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, including Eduardo Coutinho’s 1984 documentary, Cabra marcado para morrer, a popular historical account about the Ligas and the Northeast during the dictatorship. Expressing many of the political concerns of the era and using “reality effects” including stereotypes associated with the o Nordeste, the film challenged the military’s official history of the Ligas as criminal, suggesting the impossibility of “healing” and a new framework for organizing people’s memories. The chapter analyzes the film’s narratives about family and motherhood in the context of the 1980s and in relation to other militant women’s memories about the coup.

This chapter examines how choreographers integrated tango themes in contemporary dance works that engage the physical and psychic trauma of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). It begins with Susana Tambutti’s La puñalada (The Stab, 1985), a solo work that cites tango culture to address histories of violence in Argentina. It then considers Silvia Hodgers’s María Mar (1998), which confronts Hodgers’s experience as a political prisoner in the early 1970s, the loss of her partner to forced disappearance, and her exile in Geneva. The discussion draws on the Swiss documentary Juntos: Un Retour en Argentine (Together: A Return to Argentina), which features clips of María Mar alongside footage of Hodgers’s trip to Buenos Aires in 2000. Finally, the chapter examines Silvia Vladimivsky’s El nombre, otros tangos (The Name, Other Tangos, 2006) as well as her appearance in the Italian documentary Alma doble (Double Soul), which follows the development of this piece.

This chapter focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) views of the responsibility to protect (RtoP). The LAC region currently experiences a situation of relative peace when compared to other continents, as it does not present any manifest cases of the RtoP. Its urgency to discuss and promote the theme is strongly related to the memory of atrocities committed in the period of military dictatorships (1960–1990s), whose sequels are still felt and still affect the safeguard of human rights. In parallel, opposers to the RtoP coherently invoke, even if distortedly, the history of political, military, and economic interventions made by the U.S. for the sake of democracy. In that regard, the post-9/11 period is viewed as a real threat to future actions in the region.

Chapter 3 presents a diptych of antithetical stage representations of Greek history, continuity, and heroism. It discusses the military regime’s attempted monopoly on culture, language, and imagery and its fascist-style use of the classics for propaganda purposes. By way of an in-depth analysis of Our Grand Circus, a contemporary Greek play written by Iakovos Kambanelles (and produced in 1973 by the popular actor-pair Jenny Kareze and Kostas Kazakos of the Kareze-Kazakos Theater Company), the second half of Chapter 3 unmasks the dynamics with which the Colonels manipulated the terms of political legitimacy, national “salvation,” and religious and moral restoration. Mass spectacle became another means to the regime’s end of “forging” a public consensus about the “regenerative” work to which it had committed itself. In contract, Kambanelles’s revolutionary work deconstructed tyrannical meaning, dared to stage defeat and deprivation, and thus debunked the glorious myth of patriotic Greek victories through the ages

Chapter abstract: This chapter serves as an epilogue to the book. In the first few weeks of the First World War, a state of emergency permanently derailed Austria's 150-year state-building project. Military necessity became the order of the day, implementing new draconian laws and leaving the administration of justice to local military commanders and over-zealous gendarmes. Mobilization depleted the ranks of local bureaucrats in the center of the monarchy while invading Russian armies expelled administrators from Galicia and the Bukovina to far corners of the monarchy. The state that had evolved over the past 150 years had become a multinational polity and was in a continual process of renewal and reform. That process came abruptly to an end.

This chapter discusses Henry Kissinger's relationship with military dictatorships, analyzing U.S. policies toward Paraguay, Brazil, and Uruguay. What is evident is that the secretary of state was comfortable and loquacious in the presence of men who authorized mass murder, torture, and terrorism. His most revealing memorandums of conversations on political philosophy are with military dictators and their minions. The mayhem created by these military ideologues forced Kissinger to confront the issues of human rights and international terrorism. Kissinger's intellectual defense of military extremism, his reluctant embrace of human rights matters, and his policies toward the military dictatorships revealed fundamental tenets about his character and his concept of international relations.

This chapter examines how discourses of religious practices and beliefs of messianism and Catholic radicalism functioned to both unite rural workers and criminalize the rural social movements, while also coding o Nordeste as fanatical and non-modern. By connecting films and popular culture to rural social movement publications and U.S. and Brazilian government documents, the chapter shows the conflicting ways in which political and cultural actors resurrected the historical messianic movement and war of Canudos (1896-7) in the 1960s. Conservatives emphasized the “fanatical” features of social movement leaders and participants, mobilizing the dominant stereotype of Nordestinos as religiously devious. Rural social movements established their own religiously based narrative of a revolutionary Jesus who fought against the wealthy for the poor. The radicalization of Catholic doctrine along with debates about the meaning of past struggles in the Northeast such as Canudos both shifted and upheld the prevailing constructions of Northeastern Brazil.

This chapter examines the grotesque policies of the military commanders of Argentina and Chile. Argentina emulated its South American neighbors when the military seized power in March of 1976. Argentina's military rulers thought it would be in the nation's best interest to eliminate 50,000 Argentines. Secretary Henry Kissinger was made aware of the Argentine military's campaign of mass murder by U.S. officials in Washington and Buenos Aires. His aides further warned him that Argentina's murderers and torturers targeted Argentina's Jewish population. The chapter then looks at Secretary Kissinger's response to Operation Condor, a conspiracy of South American military dictatorships that perpetrated international assassinations and terrorism.

This chapter looks at Tizuka Yamasaki, another “offspring” of Cinema Novo directors and one of the first women filmmakers to establish a continuous career trajectory in filmmaking. Yamasaki, who claims she inaugurated a “cinema of emotion” in the 1980s, strategically turned to melodrama to comment on Brazil's past in an effort not only to address lacunae in official versions of Brazil's history but also to contribute discursively to a process of redefining citizenship during the years of political opening before the official end of the military dictatorship. The chapter then studies Yamasaki's first, highly acclaimed films from the 1980s, including Gaijin: Os Caminhos da Liberdade (Gaijin: Paths to Freedom, 1980), Parahyba, Mulher Macho (Parahyba, Manly Woman, 1983), and Patriamada (Sing, the Beloved Country, 1984).

This chapter examines how the United States' nation building helped create a powerful South Korean state committed to maximizing its control over society as well as a formidable opposition intent on bringing democracy to the country. It looks at the continuous struggle between the state and pro-democracy forces such as students and intellectuals, particularly after Park Chung Hee introduced the Yusin system in 1972 that sparked protests against South Korea's growing authoritarianism. The chapter also considers the rise of a new military dictatorship led by Chun Doo Hwan following Park Chung Hee's assassination in 1979, which led to the escalation of conflict between democratic forces and the state. It argues that America's influence declined during this period due to its reduced commitment to Asia in general, and increased South Korean autonomy in particular.

This chapter deals with the transnational movement of scientists, mostly physicists, between Brazil and the United States that began in World War II and continued through the Cold War and the Brazilian dictatorship. It tracks the intersection between scientific mobility and foreign policy, charting the tensions between the idealism of scientific internationalism and government restrictions on transnational movement in the name of national security. We begin when the OCIAA led by Nelson Rockefeller along with major foundations mobilized scientists and engineers (as well as film stars and movies) as cultural ambassadors for American democracy. Prominent in this story were cosmic-rays physicists Arthur Compton and Gleb Wataghin. Later, capitalizing on these networks, the physicist David Bohm could settle in Brazil, which provided a safe haven for his escape from McCarthyism. The Brazilian military dictatorship that took power in 1964 changed that. Notwithstanding an official American discourse favorable to democracy, successive US presidents covertly supported the new political system. However, American physicists welcomed Brazilian colleagues into the US and even lobbied successfully for their release from prison. This paper illustrates the importance of visas and passports as instruments used by the national security state to control the movement of scientists.

The army's roles of spreading the gospel and protecting the ‘well-affected’ repeatedly brought it into conflict with civilian authorities. This chapter describes the army's involvement in removing ‘disaffected’ ministers; the clerical patronage of senior officers, particularly garrison governors; the support that soldiers gave to ‘godly’ minorities; and the backing provided by some army officers to religious radicals such as Quakers. Three case studies — Hull, Poole, and Bristol — are used to show the complex interaction of religious and political issues at local level, and also to show the interconnectedness between London and the localities in escalating and then resolving these conflicts. The response of central government was pragmatic and non-doctrinaire — a long way from the practice of a military dictatorship.

This chapter presents the third and final case study of civil resistance transitions (CRTs) and the impact of the challenges of mobilization and maximalism in CRTs. The case examined is the transition to democracy in Brazil in the 1980s following the Diretas Ja campaign against Brazil’s military dictatorship. The case study finds that high levels of social and political mobilization, combined with low levels of maximalism, facilitated a successful transition to democracy in Brazil. Civil society groups that fought against the military dictatorship continued their activism during the transition, pushing for progressive constitutional protections and fighting against corruption. The result is a robust, though imperfect democratic regime.

Rio de Janeiro began the twentieth century as capital of a nation that had ended slavery and monarchical rule only in 1888-89. In the new republic, coffee exports and early industrialization concentrated in São Paulo. Rio drew people recently out of slavery and/or escaping the struggling sugar economy of Northeast to irregular subdivisions and informal favelas. As the century moved forward, both the Vargas regime (1930-54, 1950-54) and the military dictatorship (1964-85) promoted formal urban development with land titles and services while the national capital and much of the bureaucracy moved to Brasilia after 1960 and Rio’s limited industrial base corroded. The urban population kept growing, driving a return of informal development as military rule ceded to re-democratization. Favelas, informal subdivisions, and social marginality spread again as criminal enterprises linked to the global drug economy brought limited prosperity and rising violence to the metropolis—contradictions that hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics could not resolve.

Buenos Aires began the twentieth century as a prosperous port drawing European immigrants to serve a booming export economy. It expanded outward from its core of urban power and prosperity through suburbanization, early on segregating slaughterhouse zones from sites of recreation for the comfortable. Mid-century industrialization drew workers to the peripheries—which became zones of labor politics and bases for active citizenship and Peronist power. Peronist economic and political power sustained an unequally shared prosperity past World War I. Then de-industrialization in times of population expansion accompanied by military dictatorship (1976-1983) and a new suburbanization to protect the wealthy brought the polarizing mix wealth and marginality, formality and informality faced earlier in other New World cities. Re-democratization failed to bring more shared prosperity—or an escape from repeated cycles of promise and crisis.