Political power of the State
Introduction
Since there is a source of political power within a community, one of the most serious and recurring problems has been the way to transfer said power to another person or another institution. The complexity of transferring it has generated innumerable historical conflicts. Even before the State existed as we know it today, changes in power were already a problem. The cause that this is a common complication in the history of cultures and countries is that not everyone respects the rules established for it.
Developing
Before a change in the person or institution that holds power, who seek access to it, but are not favored by the rules, or those who at one point try to change that figure for another, resort to alternative methods to conquer it. The most efficient option for this has been political violence in its multiple forms. This type of violence has been widely studied by social sciences, since historically it has been decisive in the political, social, and institutional future of countries.
Thousands of books and essays have been written about riots, guerrillas, revolutions or civil wars. However, one of the most frequently used and less studied political violence modalities is the coup d’etat. This particular way of violence is, even today, one of the most common ways to access power in developing countries. At the beginning of the 1970s, Carlos Barbé established in the Policy Dictionary, coordinated by Norberto Bobbio.
More than half of the world’s governments at that time had come to power through coups.2 This means that, just 40 years ago, the coup d’etat, a form of political violence, was the most used technique worldwide to access political power, above the dynastic successions and democratic processes together. These figures are very high for a phenomenon so little studied and at the same time so frequent.
Since 1946, a year after World War II ended, and until 2010, there were 616 coups around the world, 299 of which were considered successful, giving the phenomenon a 49% success rate.3 Making a regional division of the world, sub -Saharan Africa constitutes the region most affected by coups in the last 70 years, with 245 blows and an effectiveness of 44%. Latin America is followed, with 154 blows and a 56% success rate.
These numbers tell us that in the region that goes from the south of the Rio Bravo to Patagonia, including the largest islands in the Caribbean (Cuba, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago and Granada), there have been, on average , two.4 coup d’etat per year. Studying the region of Latin America and the Caribbean through its coups as a method of government change is a very explored and very useful tool to understand the institutions that make up the region in which we live and its evolution throughout the last years.
One of the most important problems when studying this phenomenon in the region is that, despite the fact that in recent years Latin American democracies are more solid and stable, the coups have not ceased to happen. From 1991 to 2010, 19 attempts were generated, seven of which were successful. Although compared to the years of the cold war, the number of blows decreased considerably, a blow per year remains an extremely high rate for “stable’ democracies.
conclusion
Parallel to the decrease in coups, Latin America has seen an increase in other procedures aimed at a transition in the power of the State outside the electoral procedures: the resignations of the leaders and the political trials to them, which usually conclude in imprisonment and exiles. Despite the end of the cold war, or perhaps precisely because of this, it is possible that the coups have changed to adapt to a new, regional and world reality, which allows those who used to access power through coups.
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