Madres de Plaza de Mayo Argentina

Madres de  Plaza de Mayo Argentina

One of the best-known human rights organizations to emerge in response to the dirty wars in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) began its silent vigils on April 30, 1977, protesting against and demanding accountability for the disappearance of their children during the Argentine military dictatorship (1976–83; it is estimated that during this period the military disappeared between 15,000 and 30,000 persons).

Every Thursday afternoon, from 3:30 to 4:00 p.m., the Mothers would gather at the May Pyramid (Pirámide de Mayo) in the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace, wearing white head scarves, often carrying photographs of their missing children, and walk slowly in circles, demanding government accountability for their disappeared sons and daughters.

The founding members of the organization included Azucena Villaflor Devincenti (its first president); Berta Braverman; Haydée García Buelas; the four sisters María Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Julia Gard, María Mercedes Gard, Cándida Gard; Delicia González; Pepa Noia; Mirta Baravalle; Kety Neuhaus; Raquel Arcushin; and Señora De Caimi.


The Mothers’ Association slowly grew, despite the detention and disappearance of some of its founding members, including its first president, Azucena Devincenti. By the early 1980s the Madres had grown to several thousand members and garnered the support of key international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

Many consider that the Madres played an important role in delegitimizing the military dictatorship and helping to usher in the period of democratic rule from 1983. The Madres have continued their weekly vigils from 1977, demanding that the government account for their missing children and that the responsible parties be subjected to criminal prosecution, and refusing government offers of monetary compensation (reparación económica) if not accompanied by acknowledgment of responsibility.

In 1986 the group split into two main factions: the Mothers of the Founding Line (Linea Fundadora), led by Hebe de Bonafini, and the Madres; each currently maintains its own Web site. The group has received international accolades for advancing the cause of human rights, including the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought (1992), the United Nations Prize for Peace Education (1999), and the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights (2003).

The Mothers of the Founding Line has been criticized by some for its lack of internal democracy, cults of personality, and other factors. The Madres also spawned the formation of related groups, including the Association of Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo). Both factions of the Madres continue to demand government accountability for crimes perpetrated during the dirty war, and remain active in the field of human rights.

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

Jean-Bertrand Aristide

A major and highly controversial figure in the modern history of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was born in Douyon in southern Haiti on July 15, 1953. After being orphaned as an infant, he was raised by the Society of Saint Frances de Sales (the Salesians), a Roman Catholic religious order.

Educated at Salesian schools, including the Collège Notre-Dame, from which he graduated with honors in 1974, he continued his education at a number of religious schools in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and elsewhere, and at the University of Haiti, before his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest in 1982.

A gifted orator and organizer, he was especially influenced by liberation theology, a strand of Roman Catholicism that became prominent from the 1960s and emphasized issues of social justice and political activism in alleviating the poverty and oppression of the poor and marginalized. In 1983 he was appointed to a parish in a Port-au-Prince slum, where he worked in a medical clinic and a halfway house for street children.


His activism and charisma attracted a large following and helped him build a social base for his subsequent political career. In 1986 popular uprisings led to the end of the Duvalier dictatorship, creating a political opening Aristide would soon exploit. His fiery oratory and social radicalism alienated the church hierarchy, leading to his expulsion from the Salesian order in 1988.

In 1990 in the first genuinely democratic elections in Haitian history, Aristide captured the presidency with two-thirds of the popular vote. He called his supporters “Lavalas,” which translates from the Haitian Creole as “cleansing flood” or “avalanche.”

His first tenure as president lasted less than eight months—from his inauguration on February 7, 1991, to the military coup that ousted him on September 30. Going into exile in Venezuela and the United States, he was returned to power following a United States military intervention in 1994.

During the same year he renounced his priesthood, marrying United States citizen Mildred Trouillot two years later. Constitutionally barred from running in the elections of December 1995, won by Raoul Cédras, in 2000 he won a second term. Political gridlock followed, and after a long period of political unrest, he was overthrown in a military coup in February 2004 and compelled to leave the country.

From exile in South Africa he proclaimed himself the legitimate president of Haiti. Denounced by his opponents as a self-serving agitator who advocates violence in the pursuit of political power, and revered by his many supporters as the embodiment of the aspirations of Haiti’s poor and oppressed, he remains a polarizing and controversial figure in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country.

Rómulo Betancourt

Rómulo Betancourt

One of the leading figures of 20th-century Venezuelan history, Rómulo Betancourt is generally credited with playing a pivotal role in helping to establish viable and sustainable democratic institutions in Venezuela that endured from his second presidency (1959–64) to the 2000s.

A moderate social reformer and forerunner of latter-day Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in his advocacy of populist social democracy focusing on the needs of the poor, Betancourt founded the political party Democratic Action (Acción Democrática, AD) in 1941, which would play a major role in subsequent Venezuelan political life. Threading a difficult line between the far Left, the far Right, and the omnipresent specter of U.S. intromission in this oil-rich country, Betancourt contributed in enduring ways to the institutionalization of Venezuelan democracy.

Born in the town of Guatire in the state of Miranda to a family of modest means, he starting working at 14 years of age to put himself through high school, college, and law school. In 1928 he participated in student protests against the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, events marking him as a leading member of the “Generation of 28” dedicated to democratization and social reform. After being jailed by the Gómez regime he went into exile and became active in various leftist political groups, including the Communist Party of Costa Rica.


At age 23 he penned the Plan of Barranquilla, a Marxist-inspired document outlining his vision of his homeland’s political future. After Gómez’s death in 1936, he returned clandestinely to Venezuela and became engaged in political activity against the military regime.

In 1940 he went into exile in Chile, where he published Venezuelan Problems (Problemas Venezolanos). A year later he returned to Venezuela and founded AD, gathering around him a team committed to reform that formed the nucleus of the party and skillfully using the press and other media to disseminate his ideas.

On October 19, 1945, a coalition of AD reformers and disgruntled army officers overthrew the military regime and installed Betancourt as president of a provisional government. During his first presidency (1945– 48), Betancourt’s government instituted a wide range of political, economic, and social reforms, including universal suffrage; mechanisms for free and fair elections; an accord with foreign oil companies that guaranteed a reasonable profit, decent wages, and ensured labor peace; agrarian reform; expansion of public education and public health facilities; and related initiatives.

Declining to run for a second successive term, in 1948 he transferred power to his successor, the novelist and activist Rómulo Gallegos. Later that year, in December, the military in collusion with conservative elements overthrew the Gallegos government, ruling Venezuela for the next 10 years under General Marcos Pérez Jiménez.

In 1958 a resurgent coalition of reformers and army officers overthrew the Jiménez regime, installing a democratic AD-dominated government, with Betancourt again as president, which broadened and deepened the reforms of the 1940s. Since 1958 Venezuela has been ruled by a succession of democratically elected governments.

Surviving an assassination attempt by Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1960, and promulgating the Betancourt Doctrine that denied diplomatic recognition to regimes coming to power by military force, Betancourt died on September 28, 1981, in Doctor’s Hospital in New York City.

Juan José Arévalo

From 1944 to 1954 Guatemala experienced an unprecedented democratic opening that began with the overthrow of the 13-year dictatorship of Jorge Ubico (1931–44) and ended with a coup d’état against president Jacobo Arbenz (1951–54), orchestrated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Serving as president during the first six years of that democratic opening (March 15, 1945, to March 15, 1951), and instituting far-reaching constitutional, social, and labor reforms, was the former university professor and “spiritual socialist” Juan José Arévalo.

In the early 1940s a protest movement against Ubico erupted in Guatemala, centered on the cities and spearheaded by university students, professionals, and disgruntled military officers. Ubico resigned on July 1, 1944. The three-man military junta that assumed power oversaw national elections, widely considered the fairest in Guatemalan history up to that time. Arévalo won around 85 percent of the vote.


Arévalo was born in Taxisco, Guatemala, on September 10, 1904. At age 30, he traveled to Argentina, earning a doctorate in philosophy and teaching at the University of Tucumán. With Ubico’s overthrow, Arévalo returned to Guatemala and became the favorite of the protest movements that had ousted Ubico. In his inaugural address he outlined his vision of the “spiritual socialism” that would guide his administration.

A complex and not entirely coherent political philosophy, Arévalo’s spiritual socialism emphasized the interests of working people, social justice, individual and collective rights, and respect for the dignity of ordinary people, including Guatemala’s large indigenous population.

One of his administration’s first steps was to promulgate the constitution of 1945, which expanded the franchise to all illiterate males and literate females age 18 and older; forbade presidential reelection; and guaranteed the autonomy of Guatemala City’s University of San Carlos, with funding at 2 percent of the national budget.

There followed a series of broad-ranging reforms in public health, social security, education, and labor relations akin to the New Deal in the United States. Government expenditures on public health, including rural health clinics and potable water projects, expanded dramatically. The Social Security Law of 1946 created the Guatemalan Social Security Institute. Spending on education, literacy programs, and school construction rose 155 percent from 1946 to 1950.

The 1947 Labor Code guaranteed workers’ rights to unionize, strike, and bargain collectively; mandated minimum wages; and limited child and female wage labor. An especially delicate issue on which Arévalo tread lightly was land reform.

Most of the country’s arable land was owned by a small landowning elite and, on the Caribbean littoral, by the United Fruit Company, with its huge banana plantations. Establishing an Agrarian Studies Commission in 1947, and guaranteeing certain rights for rural laborers in wages, rents, and housing, for the most part Arévalo left the land tenure issue alone.

His successor, Jacobo Arbenz, instituted major agrarian reforms, provoking the opposition of powerful conservative elements within Guatemala, the United Fruit Company, and the Eisenhower administration. Arbenz was ousted in a coup in June 1954, ushering in a prolonged period of military dictatorship. Arévalo died in Guatemala City on October 6, 1990.

Bolivian Revolution (1952 – 1964)

Bolivian Revolution (1952 – 1964)

Beginning in 1952 Bolivia underwent a social and economic revolution, spearheaded by the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, MNR), a political party founded in 1941 and led by the economist Victor Paz Estenssoro and the lawyer and former president’s son Hernán Siles Zuazo.

The roots of the revolution can be traced to Bolivia’s humiliating defeat by Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932– 35); decades of military dictatorship and politically exclusionary rule by the landowning and military elite; the country’s long history of class and racial inequality and extreme poverty among its mostly indigenous population; and the emergence of new leftist political forces from the early 1940s, particularly its labor unions, peasant leagues, and Marxist-oriented political parties.

Coming to power through both electoral victory and popular mobilizations, after 1952 the MNR instituted a range of far-reaching social and economic reforms. By the late 1950s the revolutionary process stalled in consequence of mounting conservative opposition, growing factionalism and corruption within the MNR, and U.S. support to conservative elements.


In 1964 the MNR was overthrown in a military coup. The Bolivian revolution left an enduring legacy, with much of the popular unrest and indigenous political organizing of the 1990s and 2000s finding important antecedents in the revolutionary period half a century before.

Coming to power on April 16, 1952, after a wave of strikes and street protests, the MNR under Paz Estenssoro launched an ambitious program of land, labor, and social reform. Establishing universal suffrage in July, the regime expanded the electorate from around 200,000 to over one million voters. It also slashed the size and power of the military.

In October it nationalized the country’s largest tin mines and established the state-run Mining Corporation of Bolivia (Corporación Minera de Bolivia, COMIBOL). The act fulfilled a longtime goal of the Union Federation of Bolivian Tin Workers (Federación Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia, FSTMB), founded in 1944 and led by Juan Lechín, the country’s largest labor union with some 60,000 members.

Bolivian streets 1952

Following the MNR’s assumption of power, in 1952 Bolivian trade unions formed the Bolivian Workers’ Center (Central Obrera Boliviana, COB), with the FSTMB as its largest affiliate. The COB exercised a major political influence throughout the period of MNR rule.

In August 1953 the MNR initiated a sweeping program of agrarian reform in an attempt to eliminate forced labor and address the country’s extremely unequal landowning patterns. Before 1953, 6 percent of landowners controlled upwards of 90 percent of the nation’s arable land, and 60 percent of landowners controlled 0.2 percent.

While not all of the provisions of the 1953 Agrarian Reform Law were implemented, in later years land ownership became significantly less unequal. Peasant leagues, forming armed militias, exerted considerable influence on the revolutionary government, partly through their representation in the new Ministry of Peasant Affairs.


By the end of Paz Estenssoro’s first term (1952–56), the revolutionary process had slowed in consequence of mounting opposition from conservative elements, growing polarization within the multiclass ruling coalition, economic decline in the tin and farming industries, and skyrocketing inflation due to increased government spending.

Under the presidency of Siles Zuazo (1956–60), the United States stepped up its efforts to moderate the regime through increased flows of economic assistance, heightening the country’s political polarization. By Paz Estenssoro’s second term (1960–64), the MNR’s more radical elements faced mounting internal and external opposition. In 1964 a resurgent military overthrew the regime, followed by a series of military dictatorships that ruled until 1982.

Juan Bosch - Dominican president

Juan Bosch - Dominican president

Poet, scholar, educator, activist, politician, and the first democratically elected president of the Dominican Republic after the long dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo, Juan Emilio Bosch y Gaviño is most remembered for championing the rights and dignity of ordinary Dominicans through his writings and his progressive liberal democratic politics. His tenure as president was brief, lasting only seven months—from February to September 1963—when he was overthrown by a coalition of conservative forces.

He nonetheless continued to play a major role in Dominican politics, running for president and losing repeatedly to United States-supported candidates (1978, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994), becoming the standard-bearer of the country’s populist left and pushing the national political discourse toward the promotion of liberal democracy, civil rights, and the political enfranchisement of the poor and working class.

Born on June 30, 1909, in the Dominican town of La Vega to a Puerto Rican mother and Catalonian father, at age 28 Bosch went into exile in Cuba to escape the repression of the Trujillo regime. Two years later, in 1939 in Havana, he cofounded the Dominican Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Dominicano, PRD), which would later play a major role in Dominican politics.


Devoting much of his time to poetry and writing, in 1933 he published his first collection of stories, Camino Real; from 1935 to 1963 he published no fewer than 13 novels, anthologies, and works of nonfiction (from Indios [1935] and La mañosa [1936] to David, biografía de un rey [1963]).

After Trujillo’s assassination on May 30, 1961, he returned to the Dominican Republic, and, after a tempestuous interlude characterized by widespread popular mobilization and abiding United States concern relating to the cold war and the radicalization of the Cuban revolution, Bosch was elected president in the national elections of December 20, 1962, with 64 percent of the vote.

Assuming the presidency on February 27, 1963, he embarked on an ambitious program of economic, political, and social reform. His administration promulgated a new liberal constitution in April that secularized the government; guaranteed civil rights for all citizens; imposed civilian control on the military; and inaugurated a far-reaching program of agrarian reform.

The reforms alienated the most powerful sectors of Dominican society, including the Catholic Church, the military, industrialists, and large landowners. In the context of the intensifying cold war, the stage was set for a U.S.-supported conservative coup, which came on September 25, 1963.

Going into exile in Puerto Rico, he returned to the Dominican Republic in September 1965 after the United States military intervention of April that ended an emerging civil war between pro-PRD and anti-PRD factions. He ran again for president in 1966, but was defeated by the U.S.-supported Joaquín Balaguer. While he never regained the presidency, he became renowned for his left-populist rhetoric, the acuity of his social criticism, and his determination to improve the lot of ordinary Dominicans.

In 1973 he founded a new political party, the Dominican Liberation Party (Partido de la Liberación Dominicana, PLD), which since the mid-1990s has drifted to the center-right. The author of at least 36 publications translated into many languages, and popularly revered as a national hero, he died on November 1, 2001, in Santo Domingo.

Bracero Program (1942 – 1964)

Bracero Program (1942 – 1964)

The Bracero Program, begun in August 1942 at the height of World War II in response to war-induced labor shortages in the United States, was a joint U.S.-Mexican agreement to bring temporary Mexican male laborers to work in the United States agricultural, railroad, and related industries.

While the program was conceived as a temporary wartime expedient, commercial fruit, vegetable, and cotton growers in the United States Southwest found the program so profitable that they persuaded the U.S. Congress and Mexican governments to extend it for nearly two decades after the end of the war.

In the 22 years during which the program was operational, an estimated 5 million Mexican men worked as braceros (a term roughly synonymous with “jornaleros,” or “day laborers”). Repeatedly condemned by human rights activists as abusive and exploitive, the Bracero Program had a major impact on the economic, social, and cultural history of both Mexico and the United States.


The program provided millions of poor Mexicans with legal entrée into the United States, familiarizing them with the land, its people, its wage structure, and its employment opportunities. For some it provided an opportunity to reconnect with kin on the U.S. side of the border.

After completing the terms of their contracts, many braceros opted to stay in the United States illegally or to return to Mexico and cross the border clandestinely at a later time. The program also made major contributions to the development of commercial agriculture in the U.S. Southwest.

While the terms of the original agreement mandated a minimum wage of 30 cents per hour, humane working conditions, and free round-trip transportation between Mexico and sites of employment, in practice the U.S. companies hiring bracero laborers frequently failed to adhere to these requirements.

braceros in the farm

Unauthorized and sometimes exorbitant deductions for food, housing, medical attention, and other necessities were common, as were abusive practices such as substandard food and housing, poor sanitary conditions, physical intimidation, and violence. The program was briefly halted in 1948 in response to a decision by Texas cotton growers to pay braceros $2.50 per hundred weight, while non-braceros earned $3.00.

The Mexican government responded by suspending the program, an impasse resolved with a U.S. government apology and a new agreement in 1951 under U.S. Public Law 78 (sometimes called the “second” Bracero Program), which continued until 1964 (with successive “temporary” extensions in 1954, 1956, 1958, and 1961). Through the 1950s, an estimated 300,000 Mexicans worked as braceros annually.

In order to combat illegal immigration and the tendency of many braceros to remain in the United States without authorization, in 1954 the United States government launched “Operation Wetback,” a program intended to repatriate unauthorized Mexicans, which also resulted in the deportation of some U.S. citizens. By the mid-1950s such repatriations reached a high of 3.8 million.


The Bracero Program is the subject of an expansive literature. The most rigorous early scholarly investigation was by the Mexican-American scholar and activist Dr. Ernesto Galarza, whose book Merchants of Labor (1964) is considered a classic in the field. Testifying repeatedly before the U.S. Congress and other government bodies, Galarza and others finally persuaded lawmakers to end the program.

The program’s termination coincided with the rise of the National Farmworkers Association (later United Farmworkers of America, UFW), led by labor organizer Cesar Chavez. In many ways, the ending of the Bracero Program—and the glut of cheap migrant labor it provided—made possible the rise of the UFW.