ABSTRACT
The development of sports policies in Latin American countries has remained strikingly consistent across regime type through the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Leaders involved in regimes of all types—populist, revolutionary, constitutional, military or civilian dictatorships, democratic, or neo-liberal—responded to popular demands and shifting international norms in their sporting practices, including support for programmes or construction, and in their rationale for that support. No matter the regime type, leaders saw sport as a tool for legitimatizing the regime, mobilizing or incorporating popular support, and measuring the regime’s achievements against those of regimes in other countries. Even the bloodiest regimes relied on a sport to counterbalance otherwise repressive tactics. This chapter offers a general study of the consistencies and changes in sports policies across regime types in Latin America from a lack of government involvement in sport in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries; to the rise of government influence during the consolidating revolutionary and populist governments of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s; through the Cold War and neo-liberalism; to finish with more recent trends as governments adjusted to and pushed against neo-liberalism. Although sport has been intricately connected to politics and even political regimes and leaders in most cases, a historical study reveals the strong influence of popular demands and international trends in determining the nature of this relationship. This chapter offers a general survey of Latin American sports policies and political regimes, using the Dominican Republic as a central case. The many regime changes during the 1960s and the importance of the baseball industry to the country’s current economic and political standing attests to the value of the Dominican case for understanding the effects that political regime change and international ideas about sport have had on national sporting policies and practices in Latin American countries.
