Military Radicalism in Latin America

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Miami is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs. Analyses of military roles in LatinAmerica during the two decades following World War II often assumed the military were both isolated or apart from politics, and hence amenable to civilian control. The resurgence of militarism since the early Sixties has been reflected in scholarly works reassessing these assumptions. Whereas the pioneers in this field, such as Lieuwen (1964) and Needler (1969), are clearly civilianist-reflecting a democratic and distinctly liberal bias in their values-students of Latin American militarism in the late Sixties and Seventies have increasingly, if tacitly, assumed the unviability of civilian hegemony and tended to downplay the democratic normative issue. Terms such as militarism, democracy, and civilian supremacy have been virtually eclipsed from analyses of military intervention (Johnson, 1964;Einaudi, 1969;Ropp, 1970;Stepan, 1971;Rankin, 1974;Needler, 1975;Fitch, 1979).Regardless of how one assesses the legitimacy of domestic militarism, the new scholarship has undoubtedly increased the precision and extended the range of our understanding. The armed forces are conceptualized as an integral component of Latin American political systems rather than as an isolated, AUTHOR'S NOTE: The author wishes to express his appreciation to John Saxe Fernandez and Octavio Rodriguez Aranjo of UNAM for facilitating this research, and to Liisa North for her criticism. 396 JOURNAL OF INTERAMERICAN STUDIES AND WORLD AFFAIRS nonpolitical institution. At the same time, there has been a healthy decline in reification as the focus of analysis is refined to include intramilitary factional, and even individual, actors. AsStepan (1971) demonstrated in hissuperb study of the Brazilian Armed Forces, even within one service, career experiences and socialization may vary so markedly that, given appropriate leadership, one faction is prepared to use arms in defense of increasingly radical leftist policies.The present study's objective is to ascertain what cluster of career and background characteristics is most likely to be associated with military radicalism of the left and right. In doing this, there is an assumption that ideologically, armed forces, regardless of the degree of professionalization, are neither invariably unified nor isolated from other political sectors. While it may well be true (Vagts, 1959;Nun, 1969;Lang, 1972;Abrahamsson, 1972) that insofar as they become politicized, military officers are more likely to opt for the right, this is not necessarily engendered by conservativism...

Mobilizing Religion for Democracy: Explaining Catholic Church Support for Democratization in South America

“…The ideological leanings of specific military governments are discernible from a variety of case-specific accounts listed in the References, as well as from their various pronouncements, and from the policies they adopted. In his study of military radicalism in Latin America, Wolpin (1981) classifies the various military leaders according to whether they had leftist or rightist preferences. Although he finds examples of both in most of the countries he analyzes, only in Peru did leftists represent the dominant tendency during the period covered by my study; leaders of regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay are considered rightist; the leaders of Uruguayan and Ecuadorian regimes are not analyzed.…”