ABSTRACT
Until recently, democracy has appeared elusive in Latin America. Efforts to secure and strengthen democracy have all too often been confronted by social forces that have jeopardized the integrity of existing democracies and advocated an authoritarian retreat. The authoritarian wave of the 1960s and 1970s, in particular, led many to speculate that democracy would not (perhaps could not) flourish in the region. The prognosis was that democracy was doomed to dead end. By contrast, the democratic turn in the 1980s and 1990s led many to assume quite the opposite—that the earlier authoritarian experiences were but political detours and that the region as a whole had arrived at a new, and perhaps inevitable, democratic crossroads.
