ABSTRACT
As the decade of the 1960s opened in Latin America there was great hope for the future of democratic reform parties. To well-wishers like Tad Szulc, the disappearance from the political scene of such condottiereas Juan Perón, Getúlio Vargas, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, Marcos Pérez Jiménez, Anastasio Somoza, Manual Odria, and Fulgencio Batista—all of whom had fallen from power between 1954 and 1960—signalled the "twilight of the tyrants." Let begin by contrasting the classical and Latin American development models in order to understand where the latter deviates. That will help to pinpoint the specific problems that any new development strategy must grapple with. Obviously, there is no time to go into detail concerning the particulars of British, German, French, US, or Japanese development. The structuralist position has been developed most cogently by a group of economists attached to the Economic Commission for Latin America, a United Nations agency.
