Domestic military missions in Latin America: Civil-military relations and the perpetuation of democratic deficits

Abstract

Latin American militaries are today in many regards inoperative and obsolete as an instrument of defence. Yet, they seek to maintain their organisational power and privileges. Governments, on the other hand, lack the adequate means to fight criminality, persisting poverty and social inequality. In an apparent win-win situation, Latin American governments have used the military as a wildcard to step in where civilian state capacity falls short, including for urban and border patrols, literacy campaigns and to collect garbage, among many other tasks. The military's manifold internal use has been defended mainly based on pragmatic reasons. We argue instead that the ostensive pareto optimality between militaries and governments has had negative effects for civil-military relations from a democratic governance point of view that takes into consideration the efficiency and effectiveness of how the state delivers basic services across different policy areas.

Military multifunctionality and democracy: a dangerous coexistence

“…Several reasons are given for this requirement of the armed forces: 1) their size is not inconsiderable; 2) their administration is hierarchical and disciplined, which is very convenient for the political decision maker; 3) they represent an administration with a high degree of territorial capillarity, which means that they are, or can be quickly available throughout the territory; 4) their requirements of autonomy give them considerable functional versatility/adaptability; and, finally 5) the military administration is accustomed to acting fast, so the troops can be mobilised and moved without delay. Nevertheless, even though this multifunctionality can be successful in the short term, it causes endless, and much more serious problems in the long term (Saint-Pierre and Donadelli, 2014;Diamint, 2018 and2020;Kuehn and Levy, 2020;Jenne and Martínez, 2022).…”

“…Military multifunctionality not only disregards the primary task of armies -defence-but it also normally means flouting the normative framework, circumventing the necessary military reforms, obstructing the development of civilian skills for the specific activities the military undertakes, and implanting undemocratic trends of political culture (Jenne and Martínez, 2022). Furthermore, the military may be enjoying privileges for undertaking these tasks, which then creates major problems for democratic governance.…”

“…Yet, the military administration is resistant to change, and rulers are averse to complications, so even if they are aware that they will be replicating Hunk, their aim is to reassure society that the state is able to deal with threats with the means at its disposal. In the long run, however, this brings the military into Military multifunctionality not only disregards the primary task of armies -defence-but it also normally means flouting the normative framework, circumventing the necessary military reforms, obstructing the development of civilian skills for the specific activities the military undertakes, and implanting undemocratic trends of political culture (Jenne and Martínez, 2022).…”

“…These are armies that are not expected to resort to use of force in the various tasks they are untrusted with because these are not missions that require shortcuts to achieve order but large-scale activities in terms of volume, space, and problems of accessibility. Governments treat them not so much as members of an armed institution but as a "joker administration" (Jenne and Martínez, 2022), which is what happens with the role of veterinarian when it ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a creed.…”

Militarización, emergencia del militarismo civil y erosión democrática en América Latina

“…Adicionalmente, se registra un gradual, pero creciente, retorno a las prácticas de "pretorianismo civil", primero en Argentina (2001), luego en Venezuela (2001) y Bolivia (2003) (Pion-Berlin y Trinkunas, 2010) y, más recientemente, también en Bolivia (2019), en Perú (2019), El Salvador (2020) (Pion-Berlin y Acácio, 2020) y Brasil (Verdes-Montenegro y Ferreira Souza, 2021). En conjunto, parece observarse una "segunda ola" de expansión de los roles militares funcionales y políticos (Jenne y Martínez, 2022), o de prerrogativas militares, similar a la experimentada durante los regímenes autoritarios (Stepan, 1988), pero esta vez como resultado, no de la agencia de las fuerzas armadas, sino de liderazgos civiles.…”