DICTATORSHIPS AND DICTATORS

The classics of the sociology define dictatorships as the political systems that are opposed to the liberal democracies. They include those to be established and sustained by means of an exceptional, abnormal and illegitimate violence, nevertheless some of them have a progressive spirit initially, when toppling monarchies, tyrannies or formal democracies that have masked the colonial dominance, latifundista or monopólica. The classics highlight like a constant that the dictatorships arise out of social crisis, to precipitate the evolution in due course, as it has been done in revolutionary processes with Vladimir Ilich Lenin in Russia, Gamal Abdel-Nasser in Egypt and Fidel Castro in Cuba, or to brake them, as it happened with Francisco Franco in Spain, Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala; all of them on the verge or against the preset legal procedures.
The classics agree in that those authoritarian regimens has stayed in power by force, leaning on in military structures sustained by unique parties created to such an effect or dominating the preexistent. They attribute them government's arbitrary approaches, suppressing the guarantees and the citizens' freedoms. They indicate that the permanent conflict of the human being collective conscience, between rich and poor, privileged and excluded, oppressors and oppressed it usually shakes the political consent of the countries. Then the apparatuses of State are overflowed by the social and political mobilization, making useless the traditional institutions, generating unwanted, sudden or unexpected conditions where the dictatorships usually appear, and almost all looking for the support of the most abandoned social sectors.
The historical inquiry and the journalistic report have demonstrated that the field of investigation is incommensurable. Dictators are not only those that govern without elections with safeguards of a State of Right, they repress to the opposition and they reduce the press freedom and opinion, but also those that supposedly admit institutions or carried legislative, executives and judicial of government, when in fact they concentrate the power on their own hands, as an extreme method to substitute the consent that grants the electoral consultation with democratic transparency. The relative popularity of some dictators before falling in misfortune, fleeting or permanent, links along last century to the Fascist, Nazi and communist authoritarianism's. Behind populist, nationalist, and revolutionaries facades all of them followed absolutist and autocratic credos, violating human rights persistently and concentrating on a man the will of decision in the peak of the societies, making use of violence and grasped to the principle that to keep power : the end justifies the means.
In that wide universe, the women of these dictators are incognito in the political literature. Their performances invite us to read about them, maybe get complementary information and perhaps deferent to the one observed regarding their husbands in the administration of power. In each couple that acquires public fame, to know a spouse can clarify on the other one. This book explores some portraits of women of the last century that have accompanied Fidel Castro sentimentally, Augusto Pinochet, Ferdinand Marcos, Alberto Fujimori, Jorge Rafael Videla and Slobodan Milosevic, but before approaching them it is worthwhile to stop in others women that cohabited with more distant dictators, before the Second World War. The election of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler and Francisco Franco is imposed by its devastating 'qualities': In turn, we should remember that Europe has offered us the most harmful dictators, being been able to affirm with fright that they have been the worst in the whole century. It is pertaining to the central story of this book to put in question several theories that affirm that dictators begin and finish in the Third World, being rocked with the cynic definition of Banana dictatorships or Banana Republics to indicate only those that have whipped Asia, Africa and Latin America. In fact it was in the Europe of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, during the XXth Century, where the bloodiest and trickiest refinements were conceived to make life for human beings an intolerable nightmare for millions. In the beginnings of this new century the United States has taken the concept of this teaching which was synthesized and systematized in the Old Continent.