Latin American Perspectives on Civil-Military Relations today

Table of Contents

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction: Civil-Military Relations in Latin America

   Bertha Judit Garcia Gallegos, Jose Manuel Ugarte

   Abstract

   In the Introduction, the co-editors of the work, Bertha García Gallegos and José Manuel Ugarte, present the fundamental aspects of the book, highlighting that it carries out an analysis of civil-military relations in Latin America, including both common aspects shared across the region and the specific characteristics observed in the seven countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela—that serve as case studies.

   The co-editors pointed out that, in addition to considering the political, sociological, and legal aspects of the issue, they found it necessary to analyze its historical aspects, which they consider a fundamentally important for understanding the topic, along with the influence of external powers and the prevailing international environment.

   They also pointed out the importance of civil-military relations for the consolidation and strengthening of the democratic system, noting that, despite the time elapsed since their independence, all Latin American countries should be considered in transition toward the full realization of that system—albeit to varying degrees—and that one of the main reasons for Latin America has not achieved a level of democratic development comparable to that of younger countries, such as India and Israel, lies in these relations.

   They also stressed that, among the types of civil control identified by Huntington in his classic work “The Soldier and the State,” they clearly considered objective civil control as preferable. In Latin America, they noted that cases of subjective civil control, such as that of Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, the attempt in Ecuador by Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, and Evo Morales in Bolivia, had, for various reasons, failed to contribute to the strengthening of democracy in their respective countries. They emphasized that efforts to align the Armed Forces with a certain political sector have been detrimental to democracy in the region.

   Kewords: Civil control, Civil-military relations, Democracy, Democratic development, Objective and subjective control.

3. Chapter 2. Civil–Military Relations in Latin America: History, Key Issues, Current Situation, Perspectives

   Jose Manuel Ugarte

   Abstract

   This chapter analyses the history, the most important aspects of civil–military relations in Latin America, the current situation in this area, and the perspectives.

   It also highlights the importance of: the historical background, certain external actors, and the wider international environment. The international circumstances and contexts examined include matters such as the Cold War, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the subsequent War on Terror, the two Gulf Wars, and the emergence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

   The chapter also highlights the importance of civil–military relations in any part of the world, but especially in Latin America, in terms of the establishment and consolidation of the democratic system. This also emphasizing that all Latin American countries must be considered to be still in transition, albeit to very different degrees and situations, towards the full realization of the democratic system. The chapter highlights that the pattern of civil-military relations in the countries of Latin America is one of the fundamental reasons why they have not achieved full development and consolidation of the democratic system despite the time that has passed since they gained their independence.

   It was highlighted in this regard that Latin America was characterized for many years by a pattern of political instability resulting from military coups d’état, and that although, in recent years, the frequency of such events has decreased, they have not disappeared entirely.

   It is also pointed out that in several Latin American countries, the Armed Forces are influential political actors, and that the inclination of the Armed Forces toward engagement in politics is present in the region, and also that there is, in many of these countries, a significant degree of autonomy of the Armed Forces with respect to political power—albeit with exceptions such as Argentina, Chile, and, to a lesser extent, Uruguay. The Armed Forces of various Latin American countries are also characterized by the breadth of their missions, which include not only defense but, to varying degrees, internal security, and a set of activities classified as “participation in development.”

   In terms of civil–military relations, it is a fundamental objective that the democratically elected authorities and their appointees exercise “civilian control” or “political leadership of defense,” which implies not only avoiding interference by the Armed Forces in the country’s political issues, but also, and fundamentally, that such authorities be the ones who make the decisions in defense, and that their decisions are complied with by all persons linked to defense, including the Armed Forces.

   This must also presuppose the suitability of those who make the decisions, which includes receiving and taking advantage of military advice and knowledge, and also having adequate civil advice, assuming full responsibility for the decisions.

   Regarding the historical aspects, the emergence of political–military caudillismo in many Latin American countries following the achievement of independence was highlighted, with the consequent relevance of the Armed Forces, the military search for a leading role in the modernization of certain countries, and the rupture in various cases of institutional continuity in the global economic crises.'

   The Cold War, the American concern for the expansion of communist ideology and the granting to the Latin American Armed Forces of the mission of fighting communism in their respective countries, led to the establishment of military governments in every country in the region, with the exceptions of Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico—where military influence grew significantly anyway—and Costa Rica, which lacked its own Armed Forces. This operated in combination with the validity of the national security doctrines, which extended military competence and interference to virtually the entire political sphere in these countries, and the counterinsurgency doctrines, which focused the actions of the Armed Forces on internal security. Following the Cold War, the re-democratization of Latin America took place almost simultaneously with varying degrees of US support, but with very different levels both of civilian control and of validity with regard to the workings of the democratic system.

   Therefore, the challenge of fully achieving political leadership of defense and the full validity of the democratic system continues to be valid in Latin America.

4. Chapter 3. Always on the Political Scene: Vocation or Compulsion? A Look at Ecuadorian Civil Military Relations

   Bertha Judit García Gallegos

   Abstract

   In Latin America, people are talking about the “return of the military” or the “new militarization.” Multi-mission Armed Forces are deployed in internal security, control of illegal mining, prison control, public order, and national and international humanitarian missions. In previous governments, they held positions in the public bureaucracy, always as a benchmark of authority from the citizenry, which gives the Armed Forces high scores in institutional credibility surveys. In Ecuador, the discourse and postulates of Military Civil Relations or civil primacy, sustained as principles of democratic governance, have not interested the political class, nor the media, worse still, in the academy specialized in defense and security.

   The paper proposes to understand this relationship from a perspective anchored in the theories of power, as authority or symbolic capital, forged in the mobilization of the meanings of the institution in the construction of the national, in a country marked by regional, cultural, and geographic differences.

5. Chapter 4. The Armed Forces and Chilean Society: From the Pinochetist Constitution to the New Democratic Constitution

   Carlos Gutiérrez P.

   Abstract

   This chapter analyzes the evolution experienced by Chilean society and the Chilean Armed Forces, both in their reciprocal relationship and in matters relating to the country’s national defense, from the moment of the restoration of democracy in Chile up to the present day.

   The conditional nature of the Chilean transition is evidenced by the 1980 Constitution, imposed by the Chilean military dictatorship, and in the prerogatives and powers reserved for the Armed Forces in that Constitution. These aspects have largely disappeared due to the advances achieved during the Chilean transition, although the aspiration for a new Constitution that would definitively end the constitutional legacy of the military government persists.

   The work divides the aforementioned evolution into three stages: transitional tension (1990–2000), modernizing aspiration (2000–2010), and institutional deterioration (2010 to the present).

   In the first stage, the civilian government sought to establish its authority over the Armed Forces, which in turn sought to preserve the power sectors and the limitations on government authority established in the 1980 Constitution, with paradigmatic examples such as the persistence of the dictator Augusto Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the Army, and the powers assigned to the National Security Council, a body dominated by the Armed Forces.

   In the second stage, the civilian authority achieved a significant degree of progress. This occurred through the constitutional reform of 2005 and the sanction of Law No. 20,424 Organic Law of the Ministry of Defense, and, simultaneously, under the protection of Law No. 13,196 “Copper Reserve,” a significant re-equipment and modernization of the Chilean Armed Forces also took place.

   In the third stage, there were significant investigations into cases of corruption in the Chilean Armed Forces regarding the purchase of military equipment. Likewise, the country’s serious social crisis (2019–2020), which led to strong repression, expressed the dissatisfaction of large sectors of the population and gave rise to a process of debate and constitutional change that has not yet been concluded. In recent years, the Armed Forces have also been involved in internal security tasks, in Araucania and on the country’s northern border.

   In short, in Chile during this period there have been unequivocal advances toward securing the political leadership of defense, but there is still work to be done to perfect such leadership, to achieve the full integration of the Armed Forces into society, and to establish the participation of the civil society in the design and formulation of defense policy.

6. Chapter 5. Limits of Exogenous Analytical Frameworks of Political Control over the Armed Forces in Brazil: Professionalism and Missions

   David P Succi Junior, Mariana da Gama Janot, Samuel Alves Soares

   Abstract

   In this chapter, we seek to highlight the limits of the concept of civilian control over the armed forces, tensioning two of its main intersecting lines of normative interpretation: military professionalization and control over domestic missions. In short, there is a current argument in the literature that military professionalism would guarantee non-intervening military behavior, obedient to civil authority. Once this relationship of obedience was ascertained, there would be more significant restrictions on domestic military engagement, ideally reserved for exceptional situations. Our objective is to demonstrate the inaccuracy of this argument, explore the literature, and analyze the Brazilian case in which the professional armed forces are procedurally subordinated to civil authority, formalizing a set of domestic missions as their main activity. To this end, we do not intend to expose Brazil as a rupture with the norm, but rather to understand the construction of the Brazilian professional military and their missions as a response to the production of science and power on the global stage, in addition to the different sociological aspects of the country.

7. Chapter 6. Argentina: Adequate Civil-Military Relations, Totally Ineffective Defense Policy? The Immediate and Deep Causes of a Peculiar Situation

   José Manuel Ugarte

   Abstract

   In a region characterized by diverse and well-known cases of military influence in politics and significant degrees of military autonomy from political power, Argentina looks like the brightest of the not-too-many exceptions. In Argentina, the laws carefully limit military powers and establish civilian leadership and control structures for the Armed Forces similar to those in force in consolidated democracies, and the aforementioned Forces comply with the orders of political power. A civilian Ministry of Defense with adequate advisory bodies and defense policy formulation, with broad participation and even civilian predominance, is in charge of preparing and executing that policy, reporting to it a strengthened Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is in charge of all the functions of joint military action. Despite this seemingly ideal situation, the country has very little real defense capacity, its reduced defense budget is mostly invested in solving a disproportionate military personnel structure, the equipment is largely old and even obsolete, and even a fund created by Congress for military re-equipment in 2020 is invested mainly in acquisitions that contribute little to defense. Although the country has an appreciable number of civilian academic defense experts, as well as a good number of well-educated military officers, the country’s poor defense situation has not ceased to draw the attention of researchers from various countries.

   The paper includes a brief theoretical conceptual framework on civil-military relations and defense policy, to then examine the current situation in both aspects, then performing an analysis of the causes, both immediate and deep, linked to civil-military relations and from other origins, which have produced the poor situation in which Argentina finds itself in terms of defense, also including proposals to overcome the indicated situation.

8. Chapter 7. Uruguay: Civil-Military Relations in the Second Decade of the Twenty-First Century

   Julian Gonzalez Guyer

   Abstract

   Since 2016, the Uruguayan armed forces have not only expanded the number and scope of their missions but also recovered the prerogatives that seemed doomed to be cut off with the approval of the Defense Framework Law in 2010. In this context, the Uruguayan military institutions underwent a denaturalization process to become multipurpose forces, focused principally on domestic tasks. This article suggests an interpretation of both, the expansion of the missions and the demilitarization of the Uruguayan armed forces‘capabilities. Both developments are functional to integrated deterrence; the new military doctrine promoted by the United States.

9. Chapter 8. Civil–Military Relations in Colombia in the Post-Agreement Scenario

   Alejo Vargas Velásquez

   Abstract

   The text starts by making some historical considerations, both on the persistence of political violence and on the relations between civil and military elites, which allow us to “understand” the Colombian peculiarity: the country in South America with the least military coups and the lack of a clear distinction between the tasks of the Military Forces and the Police, as well as the political alignment with the United States. After the period of the only military government in the twentieth century (1953–1958), a formula of civil–military relations based on “formal subordination and real autonomy”will be established.

   The changes introduced by the 1991 Constitution are then analyzed, as well as the impact of the Military Reform within the framework of the so-called Plan Colombia, financed mainly by the United States, and how once the talks between the government and the FARC began in Havana, a process of reforms began within the Forces to prepare for the Post-Agreement, with the so-called Damascus Doctrine playing a central role, but also showing how there is no linearity in the progress.

   Later, a government that some consider to be center-left won the Presidency, which proposed the policy called “Total Peace” and with changes in the Security policy placing “Human Security” at the center. The Public Force has experienced the tensions inherent to these changes, but showing the subordination to the civil power.

10. Chapter 9. The Venezuelan Armed Forces and the Praetorian Temptation

    Hernán Castillo

    Abstract

    This article raises a set of problems that Venezuelan society has historically presented regarding the need to incorporate the Armed Forces into a definitive process of institutionalization and avoid violence for political change.

    The crisis that we have been experiencing in Venezuela in the first two decades of the twenty-first century has its deepest nature in the intervention in politics of the military and its struggles, covertly and sometimes openly, for control of the state and society.

    Now, trying to get the military to peacefully transition to the definitive modernization of Venezuelan democracy depends on the capacity of society as a whole to ask the right questions and on the capacity of the leadership of the ruling civilian elite to change the political culture.

    This essay aims to be a modest effort to explain and understand Venezuelan civil–military relations.

    When Latin America seemed to have solved the problem of the place that the military should occupy in society and the state, of subordination to the civil sector and military security and defense, Venezuela in the first two decades of the twenty-first century finds itself going through one of the most serious crises in all fields of social life, as a result of the intervention of the military in politics and its indiscriminate and massive participation in development.

    Today, the struggle of civil society is focused on beginning the complex and difficult process of finding the origin, continuity, and spread of the praetorian virus and eradicating all the conditions that have allowed its development.

    The answer to the question: what role does politics play, and in particular, security and defense policy in the relationship between civilians and the military? is a more complex problem if it refers to the role of the military in democratic societies. Fortunately, on the intervention of the military in politics and praetorianism, there are extraordinary studies by authors such as S.E. Finer, Amos Perlmutter, Eric Nordlinger, among others, and for the Venezuelan situation Domingo Irwin. In institutionally backward democratic political systems, the military can conspire and fight to seize state power and dominate society. Thus, for the Venezuelan situation, the problem of military intervention in politics has a cultural nature, as proposed by S.E. Finer’s theoretical model in “the second order of political culture.”

    Finally, although the term praetorianism presents some drawbacks; in a few words, “Praetorianism is a frequently used word to characterize a situation in which the military class of society exercises independent political power, resorting to force or threatening to resort to it.”

11. Chapter 10. Coups and Self-Coups in the Americas

    Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt

    Abstract

    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.