ABSTRACT
Geopolitical thinking has been a common feature of several authoritarian military dictatorships in South America in the period from the 1960s to the early 1980s. It formed the intellectual base for the "National Security State" and influenced a series of internal and inter-state policies and development programs in this period. The conceptual framework of South American geopolitical thinking begins with the semantic problem of defining the term "geopolitics." At a simplistic level, the term is sometimes used as synonymous with "political geography" in that it stresses the relationship between geography and politics. Southern Cone geopolitical thinking is deeply rooted in classical European geopolitical thinking, and especially in the various schools that focused on the biological parallel between the nation-state and living organisms. These nineteenth- and twentieth-century European geopoliticians devoted much of their time and attention to establishing links between geography, political science, and international relations.
