ABSTRACT
By the time Tad Szulc wrote Twilight of the Tyrants in the late 1950s most of the caudillos who had held sway over the nations of Lattin America had either disappeared or were on the verge of being replaced by other, newer forms of government. Although Szulc's optimism over the explosion of democracy in Latin America proved unwarranted, the personalist dictatorship was largely a thing of the past. James MacGregor Burns, in his otherwise masterly study of leadership, simply states that "The new leaderships that emerged from tension points to change and conflict were largely controlled by ineluctable circumstances in shaping new party and other institutions. As have seen, writings on political parties tend to concentrate on the environmental variables associated with the genesis and development of those parties. The "new" caudillo was largely a product of historical forces at work in Latin America after World War I.
