This chapter focuses on the history and phenomenology of coups and self-coups with decisive involvement of the military. After a brief discussion of coup typologies, we present overviews of military coups in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Latin America. Subsequently, we discuss self-coups for which we not only examine the most salient historical cases of successful or attempted self-coups since the Estado Novo in Brazil but we also look at the recent cases of the United States (2021) and Brazil (2023). This particular comparison suggests that in both cases the role of the military was key in the failure of the coup attempts albeit for different reasons: constitutional impartiality in the United States against political positioning in Brazil. In the conclusion, we assess the history of coups and self-coups in the broader context of democracy, militarism, and illiberalism, still very much a matter of concern in the Americas today.