ABSTRACT
Conventional treatments of the problems governments face in acquiring legitimation, or acceptance and popular support, following the state-centric model of political analysis have assumed that constituencies and coalitions are national. One fundamental fact in the analysis of Latin American underdevelopment is that the structures and patterns of production in the region are the outgrowth of a center-periphery mode of international division of labor. Neocolonialism—economic, social, cultural, and political—ushered in with political independence was modernized, but structural underdevelopment and vulnerability continued as in the days of mercantile colonialism. As semiconsensual, pluralist political systems were displaced in the 1970s by a “corporate-technocratic” order, national security and antidevelopment policies substituted for the old developmentalist rhetoric. Substantively, the national security model performed essentially the same containment function and maintained the same socioeconomic forces that the developmental reformism of the Alliance for Progress was supposed to maintain.
