ABSTRACT
The insertion of Latin America and the Caribbean in the global economy firmly established by the latter part of the nineteenth century. This chapter describes that the repressive military regimes of the 1970s and the limited, "low-intensity" democracies that succeeded them exhibit a greater degree of continuity than the proponents of transition theory and the establishment media suggest. It explores that the style of modernization hinders real democracy and increases, poverty and insecurity for most people in the hemisphere. As the current style of unipolar, imperial globalization persists, so do de-democratization, widespread insecurity, and mutual vulnerability. Authoritarian capitalism rejected the demand-side implications of the early Cold War liberalism of the Alliance for Progress. Democratic transition for most of Latin America was largely the result of intraelite negotiations superintended by external actors. Rather than regime transition, this meant the consolidation of a nondemocratic socioeconomic order under a formally democratic facade.
