Economic Crises and Political [in]stability: Latin American Polities in the Face of the 1930 Great Depression

This article analyzes the occurrence of multiple coups d’état in Latin American countries around 1930. Between 1924 and 1935 there were seventeen coups which began with Chile and Honduras and were followed by others that experienced the first military coups in their history. Because Latin America’s economic expansion at that time was primarily dependent on exports and was therefore vulnerable to external shocks, the global economic crisis of the 1930s is suspected of having had a negative impact on the economic performance of the region. This may have caused poor economic performance to undermine the resistance of political institutions. But there were also parallel processes of political incorporation of workers and peasants in the region. To assess these hypotheses, we use logistic regression models. We found that economic variables with lags and the incorporation variables would contribute to account for the political instability that arose in that period, while the mobilization variables would do so to a lesser extent.