Attending to Latinx South American writing generates a more expansive understanding of how violence and migration shape Latinx literary history and narrative forms. This chapter elucidates the theoretical salience of el Hueco through its multiple significations as gap, hole, hollow, space of detention, liminal status, and form of undocumented migration. Likewise, the chapter demonstrates how the term desaparecido illuminates the emotional holes and the gaps in kinship structures left by those who are disappeared by state terror practices and immigration policies. Using texts by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, Romina Garber, Juan Martinez, Carolina de Robertis, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Alarcón, and Cristina Henríquez, the chapter demonstrates how prose narrative draws linkages between various kinds of state-perpetrated violence in the Américas. The chapter analyzes genres – from creative nonfiction to speculative fiction – and narrative strategies – from temporality and spectrality to focalization and characterization – to illuminate how Latinx South American fiction activates narrative as a form of reappearance and as a means of imagining different Latinx futurities.

Totalitarian systems, marked by extreme violence, are fundamentally bound to an ideology, such as Marxism-Leninism, which is instrumental to their creation and persistence, from the Bolshevik revolution in Russia to modern China. The chapter examines the genesis of communist totalitarian ideology in early Christian communal equality, connecting it to Rousseau’s and Babeuf’s anti-property ideals, which ultimately influenced Marxism and its vision of a dictatorial society in the name of absolute equality. The enduring pull towards egalitarianism, when pushed to extremes, can encroach on private property rights, ironically culminating in totalitarian rule and unprecedented inequality.

This chapter connects the burning and removal of the Praia do Pinto favela in 1969, the development of the Cidade Alta housing project on Rio’s north side, the development of the middle-class apartment complex Selva de Pedra on the former site of Praia do Pinto, and the preeminent soap operas of Globo Television in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The chapter shows how the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) carried out a process of state-sponsored gentrificaion through favela removal and subsidized development for the conservative middle class.

On June 27, 1973, Juan María Bordaberry, the democratically elected president of Uruguay, dissolved the general assembly and remained in office, sharing executive power with the military command. Uruguayans mention this date when asked when was the last coup d’état in their country. However, political and social actors have long disagreed over the exact meaning of this event and few would now reject that it was just one, albeit final and dramatic, step in a relatively long path toward authoritarianism. Things were different after that date in terms of state institutions as well as freedoms and rights for the citizenry, but many analysts have shown that most of these changes were in the making since at least 1968, when Jorge Pacheco Areco took power and governed under repressive measures of exception. A more recent body of literature has gone further back in time to show the importance of previous steps that aligned national politics with the polarized order of the Cold War. This chapter aims at offering a plausible narrative of what happened in the fifteen years before the date of the coup, combining basic historical facts with the changing interpretations that placed and displaced meaning and importance among them.

On March 11, 1973, after seven years of de facto government, Argentina celebrated its return to democracy in an electoral act that seemed to announce a new era. Although the alternation between the military and civilians was not unprecedented, two things led many to assume that coups were being left behind forever. First, after years of proscription, clean elections had led the Peronist movement to the government. Second, the new leader, after eighteen years of exile, was the founder of that movement, Juan Perón. “They’re leaving and never coming back!” – referring to the military – was the chant with which demonstrators celebrated the transfer of power and change of regime. Less than three years later, however, on March 24, 1976, a new military coup broke the constitutional order, with no resistance from either the armed forces or civil sectors. This chapter analyzes the main causes, internal and external, that enabled the military’s return to power. Based on the role played by the most relevant political and social actors, the chapter explains the conditions that made it possible for what was considered buried in 1973 to appear as the only way out in 1976, at least to numerous civil sectors.

Throughout the twentieth century, many Europeans agreed that individual freedom had to be defended against an oppressive state. Dissidents strove to do so at the risk of imprisonment and physical violence. Political radicals and neoliberals accused even democratic states of undermining the very possibility of living freely. But for others the relationship was far more equivocal. Social democrats promised to foster working-class people’s freedom by expanding the welfare state, thus rendering them independent of capitalism and the family. Even major dictatorships, out of an interest in mobilization or acquiescence, did not present themselves solely as collectivistic projects. Whether or not the power of the state promoted or stifled freedom thus remained a matter of controversy. This chapter explores three aspects of this relationship: how inmates of concentration and work camps in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Franco’s Spain were deprived of their freedom but desperately attempted to safeguard some vestiges of it; how the Third Reich, various Eastern Bloc regimes, and the late Francoist dictatorship tried to accommodate individualistic desires and demands within their repressive structures; and, finally, how the project of social democratic liberty took shape and was challenged from both the left and the right.

While most scholars of criminalized governance in Rio de Janeiro attribute its origins to the prison-based factions which formed during the military dictatorship (1964–85), this chapter argues that these arrangements emerged before, in the homes and on the streets and alleyways of the city’s favelas and housing projects. This chapter investigates these origins by focusing on the first embryonic gangs in Complexo da Maré in the 1970s. Combining archival research with oral histories of longtime residents, the chapter documents the emergence of Maré’s gangs after a variety of other non-state actors that had previously provided governance were increasingly marginalized during Brazil’s military dictatorship and as the abusive practices of police became more widespread. Maré’s incipient gang networks quickly began to compete over valuable drug-selling turf and, as the more successful ones consolidated territorial control, they expanded their organizations and governance activities. The chapter concludes with a description of the history of Rio’s prison-based factions and the marriage between these two organizational forms as the favela-based gangs integrated into these citywide networks.

Chapter 1 sets the scene for this book, providing the requisite background for the chapters that follow. It begins with a short overview of the military regime, focusing on repression and the gradual restoration of democratic freedoms, highlighting the role the latter played in facilitating the country’s burgeoning environmental movement. It then turns to the dictatorship’s plans for industrial growth and energy production. The chapter closes with an overview of the symbolism that surrounds big dams and an introduction to the influential generals and engineers responsible for orchestrating the dictatorship’s dam-building campaign. This chapter also lays the groundwork for the book’s first argument, that political pressures encouraged the military regime to build big dams quickly and with little regard for their social and environmental impacts.

Amid imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, white settlers were a tiny minority in most newer colonies, and in some cases, a non-white middle class arose that was educated in the colonizer's language and political system. This produced three main outcomes. (1) White settlers became a sizable minority in certain parts of Africa, which yielded electoral representation. Settler-minority regimes strongly opposed political rights for non-whites. (2) Settlers reversed their support for electoral institutions when their dominance was threatened. In the British West Indies in the mid-nineteenth century, white planters responded to the prospect of political control by Black politicians by disbanding their elected legislatures and accepting direct British Crown rule. (3) In some colonies with few settlers, a non-white middle class educated in the colonizer's language emerged. These elites were especially strong in the major port cities in South Asia and West Africa, and in colonies with emancipated slaves. Non-white elites in these areas gained representation by the 1920s, although with limited autonomy and a narrow franchise.

This chapter develops a theoretical framework centered on three actors: metropolitan officials, white settlers, and non-Europeans. Colonists could pressure the colonial state through lobbying/agitation, nonparticipation, and revolt; and metropolitan officials could respond by offering electoral concessions. What mattered? (1) Metropoles with pluralistic institutions should be more responsive to demands for electoral representation. (2) Sizable white settlements should trigger early electoral institutions (prodemocratic effect), but resistance by smaller settler minorities to franchise expansion could undermine the democratic foundations created by early elections (antidemocratic effect). (3) Where local elites were weak, non-Europeans should not gain early elections. Instead, they would move rapidly to mass-franchise elections with high autonomy after World War II, when the threat of revolt spiked. In cases with a large non-white middle class, we expect early elections with small franchises and low autonomy, which should broaden peacefully over time. Finally, cases with a national monarch should correspond with high autonomy but without meaningful electoral bodies.