Authoritarian Status Quo
In Latin America the authoritarian status quo has been maintained despite some "democratic" stirrings. Hard-line right-wing challenges mounted by General Frota in Brazil and General Viola in Argentina were repulsed by Presidents Geisel and Videla; but these victories were hardly definitive and certainly did not signify much liberalization. In Brazil President Geisel’s hand-picked successor, General Figueiredo, has permitted an "opening," including the return of political exiles, but continues to threaten a renewed military clampdown. In Peru and Ecuador elections were announced after a sharp shift to the right by the military regimes. These elections and their results were a negotiated or engineered civilian institutionalization of the underlying political-economic interests. Civilian governments in these countries can still move to the right of their military predecessors. In Bolivia, Chile, and Uruguay the military is likely to maintain its control irrespective of any and all plebiscites, the incorporation of "civilians" into the cabinet, and electoral or negotiated salidas or exits. In the Philippines President Marcos himself stated that his "elections" would not eliminate martial law, and certainly would not change the locus of power. The elections were held and were universally denounced as a farce; those who charged that they were fraudulent were imprisoned, and martial law remained in force.
More significant than these immediate political developments is the institutionalization of the more authoritarian state forms. Nearly everywhere the executive has encroached increasingly on the legislative domain. The relative independence of the judiciary has been challenged and often circumvented, or simply repressed, particularly by military governments. In Pakistan the courts were deprived of judicial jurisdiction over civil rights cases and were denied judicial review of the state of emergency declared by the executive. In Chile and several other Latin American countries the courts have lost effective jurisdiction over most "political" cases, which are tried by courts-martial, if at all (often victims simply "disappear"). In Argentina the judges who maintained a modicum of independence from the military authorities were simply replaced wholesale. Executive control increased over the press, the universities, and other institutions. Perhaps most significant, constitutions have been fundamentally amended ( India, Pakistan), or otherwise extended through "Constitutional Acts" ( Chile) or "Institutional Acts" ( Brazil). Constitutions have also been or are in the process of being replaced by wholly new ones ( Chile, Ecuador) in order to consecrate and legitimize the measures that were taken under "emergency" rule or martial "law."
