Latin America has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting its governments to take action. In this context, countries within Latin America have used their armed forces for an array of tasks to serve citizens. But how militarized is the response to COVID-19 in Latin America? This paper proposes a typology of tasks provided by the armed forces as a response to COVID-19. The descriptive findings allow us to map these tasks, attributing scores to the fourteen Latin American democracies. We also show evidence for the potential consequences of some tasks. Policing the streets to enforce stay-at-home orders may lead to the military committing human rights violations, assuming eminently civilian posts to manage the public health crisis can result in long term implications for the civil-military balance that are detrimental to the democratic control over the military.

The military in Latin America has been extensively involved in pandemic relief operations. This paper analyses the impact of militarization of pandemic relief operations on human rights. It argues that not all militarization is equally harmful to individuals in the region. When troops assume responsibilities regarding medical care and logistical support, human rights violations do not follow. When involved in policing the stay-at-home orders, the extent of human rights violations is explained by the level of operational autonomy the military has in public security operations. The more autonomous the military, more likely abuses are to occur. Additionally, military exposure to judicial prosecution for human rights offenses contributes to the explanation. After gathering original empirical evidence from 14 Latin American democracies on military presence in pandemic relief, we draw our inferences from process tracing on four comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador.

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This paper explores how state agents and civilians justify human rights violations when the military perform police tasks. Based on a set of interviews and documents, it analyses the actions of the armed forces and the police during a military‐led operation that targeted drug trafficking organisations in Tijuana. In a context of limited civilian control over the armed forces and the police, the paper identifies two discourses that supported the illegal action of state agents: the construction of a foreign other who does not belong to society and the need to use violence to accomplish a greater good.