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The Future of Democracy in Latin America

By Frank Tannenbaum
April 1955
Article Summary and Author Biography

FRANK TANNENBAUM, Professor of Latin American History at Columbia University; author of "The Mexican Agrarian Revolution," "American Tradition in Foreign Policy" and other works; his article is based on a paper prepared for the Columbia University Bicentennial Conference, to appear in the proceedings of the Conference later this year

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THERE is no reason for believing that political stability in Latin America is greater in the nineteen-fifties than it was a hundred years ago. Revolutions in the last 30 years have been as frequent, dictatorships as numerous, durable and oppressive as they were a century ago. It may, of course, be argued that the reasons for instability have changed, and the contention may or may not be true. But the fact of revolution versus dictatorship has remained constant. It cannot even be said that the contemporary revolutions are less bloody or that the tyrannies are more humane. What happened in Colombia between 1946 and 1954 is sufficient to disprove that thesis. Democratic government has remained an unfulfilled hope in spite of the many interesting constitutions that have been written during the last century. The aspiration to achieve the ideal of legality has failed. I shall seek here to suggest some reasons for the failure and to argue for a way out of the dilemma posed by the dream of representative democracy and the fact of revolution or dictatorship...

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