PART I

1—
In Search of the Americas:
Societies and Powers

We cannot understand the power and role of the military in Latin American public life without a knowledge of the societies within which the military establishments are situated and the forces they control. This is a difficult and ambitious task. What are we suggesting? That we should avoid being content with vague and convenient generalities or stereotypes? Words themselves are deceptive. Does Latin America exist? To speak of a number of Latin Americas does not make things any easier. Culture, language, and geography are not helpful. Is not Mexico part of North America? Who has ever thought that Canada, even if part of it speaks French, belongs to what is called Latin America? And the recently created organization for economic cooperation called the Latin American Economic System (SELA) includes several English-speaking countries.

That group of countries conveniently referred to as Latin America is defined above all by a set of political and economic relationships. It is an America that is dominated and dependent, that speaks mainly Spanish and Portuguese, but also in some cases French, English, and even Dutch. In other words, it is an America that is "peripheral" in relation to the metropoles of the industrial world. Its nations possess a parallel—although not identical—history, to the extent that they have generally experienced the same stages in their development. Without ignoring the differences in size that separate them, we cannot fail to recognize that they share a common destiny. However, the unique characteristic of this subcontinent in relation to other dependent

areas is that culturally it belongs totally to the West. Conquest and colonization did not simply influence these societies; it created and molded them, imposing on them the language, religion, values, and attitudes of Europe. Thus, whatever the impact of the pre-Columbian past and of its resurgence, Latin America is the part of the Third World that is Western. In addition, the colonization of the major part of this "New World" by the Spaniards and the Portuguese took specific forms that we know in their overall historical characteristics but not in their present effects and undeniably lasting impact.

A Conquered Continent

It may seem paradoxical to make a detour through the myths of El Dorado in order to understand the contemporary societies of Latin America. Nevertheless, the colonial heritage and the mechanisms of the conquest have affected the evolution of these societies in an irreversible way. One can even maintain that the conquest never ended and that it continues today. This is true in part because of the continued extermination of the aboriginal populations as a continuation of the demographic catastrophe inflicted by the sixteenth-century conquerors on the indigenous populations of the Caribbean and of Mexico and the Andean countries, but also because of the social regression and degradation that have been imposed on the descendants of the great American civilizations. In addition, however, local ruling classes have worsened the situation of economic dependence by their predatory behavior, which is not unlike (at least in its motivation) that of the original conquistadores .

Since the discovery of America, the riches of the continent conquered by the Spaniards and Portuguese have been exploited not on the basis of the needs of the local populations but rather to fulfill the needs of Europe. This is the definition of the dependency relationship—which some today call "the pillage of the third world." In the present phase of development the contradictions between the international and the domestic markets have adopted new forms; despite industrialization, they have not disappeared. When the lower classes demonstrate in

Rio de Janeiro because they cannot obtain feijao preto (black beans), the reply is that the balance of payments requires that everything be sacrificed to the need for exports: soy beans for export rather than black beans to eat.

As producers of raw materials for the world market in the colonial past^[1] and to a large extent today, the states of Latin America are marked by the fact that they were established specifically for exploitation. The gold fever that characterized the beginnings of the Latin American adventure did not die out when the "flight of the birds of prey" was over. Quick riches, the desire for immediate profits without thinking of the future, and an immediate preference for products that are "instantly rewarding" continue to influence economic attitudes.^[2] Brazil has had a cyclical history of dominant products. Booms and rushes likewise mark the evolution of the Spanish-speaking areas of America. The external domination of the economies institutionalized the conquest and introduced speculation into the productive order. The most dynamic sectors of the subcontinent's economic elites were more like conquistadores than the conquering bourgeoisie, sacrificing everything to the current speculative venture without thinking too much of the future. Then and now one can speak of a "rapist agriculture" in the countryside, characterized, as Claude Lévi-Strauss aptly observed, by a soil that is "violated and destroyed" and by a nature that is "more fierce than ours because less populated and less cultivated but still lacking in true originality—not savage, but uprooted."^[3]

That "seduced and abandoned" nature and the dehumanization of the countryside of which it is made up are not the only current manifestations of the "bandeirante dream of a quick fortune," or the walking madness of a Lope de Aguirre—to employ two symbols of the continuation of the conquest. The European immigrants of the nineteenth century who landed by the millions in temperate zones of South America came in order to "make America." The ease with which the Latin American economies can be adapted to different purposes, their astonishing plasticity that translates into the easy movement of capital from agriculture to industry and back depending on the international market, the importance of the financial sector, the rapidity of an imitative industrialization that conveniently associates

itself with the large international conglomerates, are all indicators of the unstable availability of men who are ready to engage in adventures that are proposed and developed from abroad. The continuing presence of the conquest is also to be taken in a more literal sense that directly affects social relationships.

Feudal Conquest and Social Outcasts

One cannot speak of the social structures of the Latin American world without emphasizing the concentration of landed property. The dualism, latifundio-minifundio, if those two terms are not limited to a geographical significance, affects almost all Latin American countries, whatever their degree of urbanization; this would include those that have various forms of medium- and family-sized properties, such as Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, and the south of Brazil. We will spare our readers monotonous columns of figures or dramatic exaggerations. Reference is often made to the case of prerevolutionary Mexico in the period of Porfirio Díaz when the Terrazas family owned 2.5 million hectares (6 million acres) in Chihuahua, and one railroad line ran for 120 kilometers (72 miles) through a single property in the state of Hidalgo. It is less well known that Chile in 1964 had a very high concentration of property ownership, largely unproductive, with 6.9 percent of the properties comprising 81.3 percent of the land.^[4] One should not assume that the large landholdings only involve uncultivated or low-quality land. A list of the proprietors who own more than 30,000 hectares (75,000 acres) in the very rich province of Buenos Aires shows that two families before World War II owned more than 400,000 hectares (1 million acres) each of the fertile land in the pampas.^[5] Even today, more than 11 million hectares (27 million acres) are divided among 500 landowners.

Over and above these bare facts, it is the mechanism of monopolization and dispossession that interests us here. This activity has been carried out since the beginning of the European occupation; it does not belong exclusively to the colonial period. Even after independence the large landholdings were extended and consolidated thanks to the seizure of Indian

lands and the sale of church properties. The elimination of the guarantees granted to the Indians by the Spanish crown and the formally egalitarian spirit of liberalism that dominated the new republics opened the way to the breakup of the Indian communities, the annexation of their territories, and even to the expulsion of their members. The secularization of the lands of a clergy that was often rich and monopolistic and the distribution of the common lands of the villages—always in the name of progress and liberty—which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century benefited a small number of buyers with good connections. In the same period the states themselves, in order to get revenue or to pay off debts, sold remote and inaccessible land that had become valuable with the "pacification" of the Indians in Chile and Argentina and with the progress of communications.

We should not believe that the extension and exaggerated size of the large landholdings was a direct response to the necessities of the world market. In contrast to the slow advance of the frontier carried out by the pioneers of North America, land was taken over south of the Rio Grande before it could be developed, or even before there was any desire to settle it. Were such acquisitions made out of a spirit of conquest, a desire for prestige, or a wish to live like the nobility? In numerous cases the hacienda was as valuable because of the population that it contained as for its lands and potential riches. Its economic significance was less important than its political role and its social function. In fact, it has been said that the relatively equitable distribution of property in areas such as Costa Rica was based precisely on the absence of an indigenous population that could be exploited and dominated.^[6]

Feudal conquest still goes on today. But motives related to profitability and capitalist rationality have replaced and sometimes aggravated archaic precapitalist motivations. We see the creation and recreation of large landholdings, sometimes out of tracts that were previously divided in a transitory fashion by agrarian reforms, in every country where agriculture plays a decisive economic role. Even in Mexico where, as the Zapata movement demonstrates, expulsion from agricultural holdings was the cause of the great revolutionary outbreak of 1910 and

where an agrarian reform has been carried out which is the pride of the regime, the present situation, despite the legal limits on the property right, is not very different from that before the Revolution. It is estimated that in 1910, 11,000 landowners owned 60 percent of the national territory while, in 1970, 0.8 percent of the properties (around 10,000 units) comprised approximately the same area.^[7] Ninety-six hundred properties amount to 95 million hectares in area, while only a little more than half that area has been redistributed in fifty years of agrarian reform. The number of landless peasants has also nearly doubled between 1950 and 1966.^[8] In Pinochet's Chile an agrarian counterrevolution since 1976 has reestablished the large landholders in their properties and power.

In Colombia the violencia, the civil war that ravaged the countryside beginning in 1948, had among other consequences the effect of fostering agrarian capitalism at the price of the expulsion of the farmers and small landholders from the lands that they had been cultivating.^[9]

In Brazil in the 1980s, which because of the economic crisis and the absence of petroleum has turned back to agriculture, virgin territories are offered to large European, Japanese, and American companies. The Amazon region is sold at auction, and the heart of the continent is savagely deforested with no concern for the ecological consequences. Everywhere the large companies use their henchmen—the jagunços and grileiros —to uproot settlers who lack legal titles in order to dear patches torn from the forest. The most spectacular case of this feudal expansion is the private empire that has recently been carved out by an American businessman on the Jari River, not far from Belem and French Guyana^[10] —1, 5, or 6 million hectares, no one knows—at the same time that land invasions by dispossessed peasants are daily occurrences in nearly all Latin American countries.

Rapacious acquisition of land is not a marginal, residual, or insignificant phenomenon in semi-industrialized societies that are characterized by rapidly expanding cities. Paradoxically, in the most urbanized countries of the continent, Uruguay and Argentina, the agrarian export sector is still the driving force of the economy, and it is only in certain mineral-based economies

such as that of Venezuela that agriculture has little importance in social relations. It is on this level that the phenomenon that we are describing is so significant. There is a theory that in Central Europe and the Mediterranean countries the weakness of the small peasantry and family farms was one of the causes of political instability and the rejection of liberal democracy. In contrast, the small French peasantry that owned half of the land in the kingdom prior to the Revolution of 1787 is said to have been the basis of the French Revolution. The pioneers on the frontier and the beneficiaries of the Homestead Act were supposed to have guaranteed the stability of American democracy. Whether or not this theory, which needs confirmation, is true, the profound and lasting social impact of the land tenure system has produced societies very different from our own, in which domination has never ceased to be more important than production, and capitalist rationality is often subordinated to social reproduction and the maximization of power.

The Order of the Manor and Capitalist Modernization

More important than the devastating but brief period of mineral development during the first period of colonization, the longlasting landholding system in the countryside was, with only a few exceptions throughout the continent, the true foundation of sodal relations. The model of hierarchy in the hacienda had a deep impact on the social fabric, influencing conduct and creating a deep chasm of unbridgeable social distinctions. The usurpation of the lands belonging to indigenous communities, the widespread forms of tenure shareholding paid for by days of labor or personal and family service in the master's house,^[11] were sources for and models of the rigidity of social structures. Between the boss and los de abajo, the master and those "without importance," there is a difference assumed to be intrinsic. The peasants are the responsibility of the masters, who are expected to treat them in a paternalistic fashion, like children to be punished when appropriate and kept in their places. These dispossessed classes do not act as social partners, participate in

contractual relationships, or take collective action, since violence is always present as a potential sanction. It is even possible, as in the case of the Peruvian peasants described by novelist Manuel Scorza, that the peons might have a "collective heart attack" after a meal offered by the landowner, as a result of daring to wish for a peasant union.^[12]

It is only a step from unlimited social authority rooted in traditional relations to the privatization of power. At the beginning of the century protesting workers in the Chilean mines were put in chains, and private prisons were still functioning in the large landholdings, whether traditional or modern. Plantations and public work camps, run by transnational companies and protected by private police, have existed in Brazil and Central America in recent years. When Juan Perón published an agricultural laborers statute in 1945 which provided for a modest legal improvement in the condition of the peon in Argentina, the estancieros denounced the government for attacking private property. In addition, one cannot overestimate the importance of local power, sometimes reinforced by the difficulty—or the monopoly—of communications. The distant and external state traditionally delegated its powers to the local notables—caciques or coroneis —who were the source of its support and whom it backed with the police force when necessary. The expansion of the state and enlargement of its responsibilities sometimes had the unintended modernizing effect of working against the social control exercised by the local notables.

This historical heritage has directly affected present-day mental outlooks, since its impact is not limited to the backward precapitalist sectors of the economy or to societies that are particularly retarded in their development. Thus, noneconomic coercive measures have been utilized frequently in labor relations during the twentieth century in contexts that are completely capitalistic. Through debts that are contracted in the obligatory company store and cannot be repaid, or through monopoly control of the agricultural food-producing land that permits owners to obtain a large and stable work force during the zafras on the plantation,^[13] capitalist enterprises linked to the international or domestic market never turn to free labor. We have even seen the establishment or reestablishment of various

forms of forced labor—for instance, in Chiapas in 1936^[14] —in response to the increased demand for exports. Conversely, it was the creation of an efficient export agriculture that eliminated the stable agricultural workers from the fazendas and replaced them with itinerant day workers (boias frias ) recruited by middlemen who provided them to the landowner who pays the highest price.^[15]

There is no trace here of structural pluralism. On the contrary, we observe the emergence of two complementary aspects of a single system of domination. The continued existence of the archaic traditional pole can be explained precisely because of the ascendancy of the modern pole. I am not trying to provide a complete description of the whole complex of social relations. I only want to locate the mechanisms, the recurring schemes or extreme models, that without exception have structured Latin American societies. For my purpose, societal memory is no less decisive than the features of real stratification that it affects.

Postcolonial Societies

Brazil and the Spanish-speaking states of Latin America, with the exception of Cuba, have been independent for more than 150 years. The colonial period thus seems to be well behind them. However, when Ecuadorean Indians were asked what the notion of patria —fatherland—meant to them, they answered—after a century and a half of independence, national symbols, and patriotic affirmations—"A bus company." (There is a company with that name in Quito.) The enslavement and repression of the Indians along with the massive importation of black slaves from Africa (Brazil did not abolish slavery until 1888) contributed to the establishment of disparate and badly integrated societies. It is not surprising that ethnic and cultural differences, as well as skin color, reinforced social segmentation. Official legal discrimination no longer exists today.^[16] Status and wealth create "whites" but there is still a bit of "enlightened racism" among the elites who embraced social Darwinism at the beginning of the century. Drawing on a "scientific" basis for their prejudices, they

continued the tradition of the fastidious colonial "pigmentocracy" that used institutional methods for three centuries to prevent the ascendancy of "castes" with impure blood.

Even in that apparent extension of Europe that is twentieth-century Argentina, social distinctions retain a discreetly colonial and surreptitiously ethnic character. Everyone knows that "the Mexicans descended from the Aztecs, the Peruvians descended from the Incas, but the Argentines descended from the ships" that brought their forefathers from Europe to the pampas. In spite of that celebrated aphorism, mass immigration also had its nobility and commoners, those with prestige and those who were despised. First there is a hierarchy in date of immigration—a Mayflower in miniature that only involves a few decades in the nineteenth century. Then there is a hierarchy of national origin. The Italian handyman and the crude Galician Spaniard are at the bottom of the scale, while the Englishman and the Basque are at the top. When a hostile aristocracy wanted to calumniate Perón, they whispered in the salons of Buenos Aires, "His real name is Perone . . . ." And in a "white" country where it is bad taste to assume that there are any traces of Indian blood in the population, the way to dismiss the descamisados, often of rural background, who followed Perón's wife Evita was to refer to their mixed-blood features and jet-black hair by alluding to the cabecitas negras, and even los negros .

The objection could be made that similar or worse hierarchical structures based on ethnicity are operative in North America. There is a difference of scale, however. The colonial dimension of Latin America societies is not to be found solely in the ethnic basis of social distinctions. The characteristics that we have described must be considered in the context of Latin America's "peripheral" situation. They are reinforced by their incorporation in a social whole in which the dominant actor is the foreigner. The external orientation of the process of accumulation and of the Latin American economies since their initial incorporation into the Atlantic market has produced social distortions that are unknown in North America.

In fact, the development of the Latin American economies was always induced from the outside—in the initial export

phase, in the brief period of autonomous national industrialization aimed at replacing imported manufactured products, and obviously today in the stage of national subsidiaries and "internationalized industrialization." At each stage modernization began with patterns of consumption, not with the creation of a productive apparatus. That "indirect access to civilization," as Celso Furtado calls it, even affected "import substitution"—the process by which local industry tries to produce manufactured goods similar to those created by the central economies. In the first or export phase an advanced "modernization" of consumption patterns was associated with accumulation that had no effect on the productive apparatus. The expansion of the primary export sector that drives dependent economies does not imply the transformation of the methods of production and any change in social relations. On the contrary, the control of the surplus, the support derived from profitable external alliances, and the cultural participation in the industrial world of the metropole reinforce the pattern of social domination. That "indirect assimilation" of industrial civilization and its values and conduct was accompanied by a remarkable immobility of the structures of society. Today the model of industrialization "associated" with multinational capitalism produces an increasing concentration of income and an expanding social heterogeneity due to the integration of new privileged social groups into the world of "developed" consumers. The growth of industry, rather than providing the driving force of national integration and social progress, only aggravates inequality and increases and "massifies" social distinctions.

In these penetrated and externally oriented societies we do not see the interplay of basic social classes characteristic in Europe, the contradictions that Marxism systematically analyzed. The confrontations and permutations of ruling classes that marked the evolution of the old continent are not the central dynamic of Latin American society. It is only by a dogmatic projection of the European experience—another form of dependence—that one can see the industrial bourgeoisie of the continent mounting an assault on the power of the agrarian aristocracy. In fact things happened in a totally different way. The exclusionary logic produced by the economic system forced the

dominant groups to compromise among themselves; the leading role of primary product export produced an industrial development that was subordinated to agricultural development rather than antagonistic to it. The industrialist, once the ties to the artisan were broken, was hardly distinguishable from the small group of large landholders and financiers from which he had sometimes originated. In addition, the conscious search for a quick profit resulted in the diversification of investments and their transfer from a stagnant sector to more profitable areas including industry. This does not mean that the bourgeoisie does not exist, but it is not always easy to identify and it is not very aware of the historical role that is sometimes attributed to it. The "relevant effects" of its actions are not comparable to those of the European bourgeoisie, since the movement from one sector to another, further complicated by its association with foreign capital, makes it in most cases only intermittently bourgeois in character.

Rather than speaking of a dualism involving an opposition between the traditional and the modern as two coherent paradigms, it is necessary to think of two contradictory and complementary aspects of a single structure of domination. More concretely, the ruling groups among the upper classes, with all the continuity and immobilism of their social structure, manage to be at one and the same time both modern and archaic; thus, this group combines the most elaborate technical progress with the most retrograde social conduct, and reflects the most up-to-date and refined European culture while exercising social power through the latest brutal methods. The "fusion effect" of this dichotomous set of behaviors and values is precisely a result of the place that these social groups have in the functioning of the overall system. Guaranteeing external domination, they use exogenous legitimation to exercise internal hegemony. In other words, enlightened oligarchies can be both modern in their ideas and tastes and committed to the most traditional system of social control.

This is why, as Alain Touraine has correctly pointed out in his analysis of the "disarticulation" of dependent societies, for those elites social reproduction is often more important than production; the maintenance of privilege can sometimes be

more important than the maintenance of the profit rate. The principal characteristics of these societies, apart from their profound differences and irreducible particularities, are the result of an effort to preserve a traditional social structure through the process of industrialization. Induced and imitative industrialization without an industrial revolution has sometimes been compared to "conservative modernization," and the adverse effects of this phenomenon in Germany and Japan have been described by Barrington Moore. The assumed contradiction involved in the desire to "resolve the unresolvable" has produced bastard regimes, militarism, and adventures. Without going further with the comparison, we simply note that this kind of social configuration is certainly more prone to the triumph of despotism than to the establishment of liberal representative systems.

Social Control and Style of Authority

The concentration of economic and social power, the rigidity of the cleavages, the permanence of structures of domination even in the most secularized urban societies—all have contributed in different degrees throughout the continent to the structure of authority and specific types of relationships. One is struck both by the vertical character of social relations and by the general applicability of a model of authoritarian domination. In fact, not only do free and equal social links seem to be rare and at least difficult but the style of the relation of elite and masses is at once repressive, paternalistic, and monopolistic. We mean by this that the mechanisms for the exclusion of those who are dominated are ambivalent and involve both together and separately the methods of obligatory cooptation and marginalization.

Clientelism and the different patronage systems express both the vertical nature of social relations and the modalities of domination. The cacique, whether a large landholder, a merchant, or a local notable, is the pivotal intermediary with the rest of society. He controls a network of those obliged to him, and often dispenses to them as a favor what would otherwise result from the laws of the market or free contractual obliga-

tions. Geographical isolation, insecurity of status, scarcity of goods (land, water, jobs) ensure relations of reciprocity based on inequality. A network of favors, organized around the powerful man, appears to be established on an individual basis according to which each individual who receives largesse remains the external debtor and prisoner of his benefactor. This is especially true in the most archaic forms of agrarian production. Thus in Chile at the time of Popular Unity (1970–73), one could see miserable inquilinos —landless peasants who pay for their small plots by labor for the owner of the fundo —engaging in public demonstrations against agrarian reform. But the politics of scarcity affects not only the traditional rural sector. The city is likewise characterized by more or less institutionalized vertical solidarity. The illegal dwelling place and the informal job impel the individual to find protectors who will give him security and favors.

To assure the loyalty of those dependent on him (clientes ) it is not unusual for the boss (patron ) to become the godfather of their children, thus creating complex and ambiguous relationships through godparentage (compadrazgo ). The compadrazgo gives a sacred significance through links of a putative and quasi-religious parentage to the clientelized relations of domination. It assures the undying loyalty of the weak to the strong, of the clients to the cacique. These mechanisms are not just attributes of old "patriarchs" or the caudillos of earlier times. We can cite the case of the manager of a sugar mill in Pernambuco in Brazil who is proud to be the godfather of one of the children of each of his workers. He addresses each of them by the informal voce and in return is addressed—with respect—by his first name.

Without always taking this quasi-religious form, systems of reciprocal obligation are the tissue of social life and affect the political culture. Even the trade union monopoly of hiring in certain countries and industries produces a clientelism that was not foreseen by the legislator. "You can do nothing without friends," says a Mexican, but those relations of friendship are rarely egalitarian. They are nearly always hierarchic and vertical, without completely reproducing the social distance involved in the classic patron-client relationship of the rural areas. Even in

Cuba under Castro, one finds that in the construction of socialism, Leninist-Soviet rationalism is confronted with Gordian knots of the sociolismo of personal friendships (socio —partner, friend) aimed at circumventing bureaucratic rigidities and the demands of ideologically motivated programs.^[17]

With few exceptions nearly all the established party systems and government political organizations, whether monopolistic or pluralistic, are structured in a pragmatic way around local social authorities and "natural leaders." On the local level the responsible leaders of the parties in power—whether it is the dominant "revolutionary" party in Mexico, the conservative two-party system of the National Democratic Union (UDN) and Social Democratic Party (PSD) in Brazil before 1964, the Conservatives and Liberals in Colombia, or even the Radicals and Peronists in Argentina—are most often those who because of their position control the local population as a result of services rendered or debts contracted. They are the ones who organize the vote and can produce votes (even unanimous ones) for the electoral market through procedures that involve a return for favors that is not far from coercion.

To give some Brazilian examples: The mandonismo of the violent strongman is the other side of his paternalistic concern (or filhotismo ). That is why during the democratic period, Brazilians would say "Electoral rallies do not win elections."^[18] In other words, free voting hardly exists. In addition, the parties and governments contribute to this type of control through lucrative favors, individual services, and the political exploitation of a highly personalistic welfare state. Social security and health care are not the result of the legislation of an anonymous administration but of the benevolent concern of the sovereign, whether it is a man or a party. Thus the system functions harmoniously, avoiding the pressures of the demands and requirements of open democratic procedures. The individual resolution of social questions utilizes the mechanisms of group cooptation to atomize larger socioeconomic aggregates.

It is evident that these links of vertical solidarity adversely affect attempts to organize horizontal groups based on class or common interest. Those who are dominated have little opportunity to choose their patron or godfather. The social pyramid is

not static but is rather a dynamic reflection of the reality of social links. The style of command that emerges from these unequal or nonneutral relationships has as its counterpart a violence that theologians have recently baptized "structural" and that observers rarely see. Only the violence initiated by those who are excluded is reported in the papers. The daily violence that expels the peasant without a title to his land or the colon who has given offense, that of the troops that eject from the factory workers who are simply demanding the payment of their wages, is not a thing of the past. Violence from above emerges at any moment, in the most apparently modernized societies, and even in those industries with a modern wagesystem and an organized and combative proletariat, as a chance result of a social conflict or economic disagreement.

This violence did not begin with its institutionalization in the numerous terrorist states that have flourished in recent years in the shadow of gold braid and the gallows. Torture was used in the police stations of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile against the maid accused of stealing from her mistress and the roto who stole farm animals long before the military launched their antisubversive wars with their sophisticated techniques. It was only when those same techniques were applied to the political sectors and the urban middle class that they were discovered in the depth of their horror.

Finally, let us emphasize the importance of this social verticality for the attitudes and practices of an institution that has magnified nonegalitarian and hierarchical values—the army.

Political Culture and Legitimacy

If one had to identify in a few words the most striking aspect of Latin American politics it would certainly not be the prevalence of coups d'états or seizures of power, or the continuismo of its presidents for life, or sophisticated schemes of electoral fraud, but rather its indefeasible idealistic attachment to the representative institutions of the West. Even when liberal principles and constitutional provisions are violated or distorted, appeals are made to the permanent values of democracy. The salesmen of

the New Order have not been successful south of the Rio Grande. Whether they are civilians or military men, they refer only to democracy and to no other source of legitimacy than the dominant liberalism. The dependence of the leading elites of Latin America upon "the mother of parliaments" and later on the country that is "the leader of the free world" is evidence of that surprising loyalty. In the "Third World" part of the West even the most rudimentary dictators mind their democratic manners. The Trujillos, Somozas, Stroessners, and many others before them have arranged to be reelected regularly by their people, and when the constitution forbade their reelection, they yielded to a faithful confederate, modestly reserving for themselves the command of the army.

It is true that an abyss separates the written constitution from actual practice. In his classic study, Democracy in Mexico, Gonzalez Casanova observes that "every citizen . . . becomes accustomed to comparing the model of orthodoxy with the reality of the paganism in which he lives and now or in the future he commits his sins," and he adds "While in Europe the theoretical and legislative models are the result of a direct creative relation between experience and political and legislative theory which produces particular instruments and techniques, in our country creative activity is the result of the application of a foreign way of thinking that we make our own through a process of imitation. In our legislation there is a process which is like that of some religions where the idols are hidden under the altars with the same sense of persecution and idolatry." The values that ought to underlie the practice resulting from the adopted institutions fulfill the function of a utopia, an inaccessible ideal that can only be reached through a miraculous process. Thus political life is played on two levels. The juridical inspiration and the manifest ideology are representative and formally egalitarian. The concentration of social power and the modes of domination that flow from them are largely incompatible, or more incompatible than in the older democracies, with the official sources of legitimacy. The appropriation of economic and political resources by a minority on the one hand, and the despoiling of the masses in a cumulative situation of inferiority on the other, demonstrate the essential dichotomy

between words and actions. These asymmetrical relations may not otherwise be obvious in the most modernized societies. Nevertheless they constitute insurmountable obstacles to social participation. Behind the "public stage" of popular sovereignty there is a "private stage" based on relations of domination. Every attempt at participation that is not controlled, that is not the result of an agreement by the participants on "the private stage," is therefore seen as a threat to the "pact of domination."

That is why one finds in the Latin American states two types of legitimacy. On the one hand there is legitimacy based on the legal order and majority rule in conformity with constitutional provisions, while on the other there is a legitimacy that one can call oligarchic, whose justifying principle is usually historical or traditional. This duality can be found in systems as different as modern Argentina and the very backward black republic of Haiti. In the Caribbean "pigmentocracy" and in the most European countries of Latin America one finds a confrontation between the defenders of the power of the "most able" and of that of the "most numerous"^[19] —the principles of liberalism against those of democracy. Thus we can understand why a policy that does not reflect the relations of domination results in the illegitimacy of the government that it has promoted.

The vertical character of social relations and the almost cosmic distance between institutional ideologies and social conduct produce a political culture of deception. The painted façades of a juridical universalism cover the particularism of personalistic relations and forces. The laws are not only made, as elsewhere, to be broken; they are often adopted, as they say in Brazil, para inglês ver, to make the English believe in perfectly advanced legislation that is never applied, those ethereal "blue sky" laws that are cited at the International Labor Office or international gatherings. Judicial institutions suffer the same fate as the law. In the popular language of the refraneros they say, "Justice is for friends and the law for enemies" and "The courts are for those who wear ruanas " (the Colombian poncho typically worn by peasants). These quasi-schizophrenic distortions are not, as is sometimes written north of the Rio Grande, the result of a psychological incapacity for democracy that is characteristic of Latin American societies, or of the Hispanic

world, but rather of social and historical conditions, a knowledge of which is essential to understand the phenomena of politics.

On the State

At the center of those networks of specific determinants is the state—which is unknown or little known. One cannot analyze military power in Latin America without speaking of the state—indeed of a particular form of the state, that of dependent societies. Furthermore, discussions of the state that forget the central role of the military bureaucracies are only serving up abstractions. This state either is ignored or the term is applied selectively to disparate realities—the nation and its territory, the political system or the center of political life and the public bureaucracy, or the legal state, which is too often simply a pale instrument of social forces. This state, for which the evidence compels the calculation of a relative degree of autonomy in accordance with a poor and distorted version of Marxist writings, is certainly not easy to define or analyze. But here we cannot enjoy the luxury of imprecision or ambiguity. We will use the term "state" to mean a single political center that controls a territory and the population that occupies it,^[20] and bases its legitimacy and power on a relationship to the forces of society.

Given this definition, we can trace certain characteristics of the development of the state in Latin America. In accordance with the historical and structural situation of the Latin American societies, the state is first of all, even during the colonial period, the place for transactions and bargaining between local propertied groups and the foreign bourgeoisie. In this sense we can make the paradoxical claim that the state in dependent societies is relatively independent of internal interests. We must qualify this assertion by excluding the patrimonial political systems governed by family dictatorships and making use of a now classic economic distinction.^[21] The role and the capabilities of the bourgeoisie and the state organizations are not the same in the nations in which local economic groups control production, and in those countries with an enclave economy.

Nevertheless, in both of these cases the state functions to harmonize the divergent interests of the different propertied classes. It is rarely the instrument of one part of the ruling classes. Its margin of maneuver is relatively large, even in societies in which the export sector is in the hands of local property holders.

The dynamic equilibrium between the internal and external bourgeoisies within the state continues to be not only conflictive but very fragile. With a passing market crisis, the end of a speculative cycle, or the failure of a project, the balance collapses. The state apparatus alone both acts as arbiter and controls the direction of society, proceeding to dictate changes that no social force has the means to cany out successfully. It is easy for the state to take charge of the interests of the nation—as defined by its personnel—because the local ruling class has failed to do so or is involved in endless debates and, except during periods of euphoria and prosperity, can hardly ever persuade the subordinate classes that its interests of the moment are identical with the common good. This is so for two reasons: first, because of the foreign associations of the bourgeoisie and the difficulty of making foreign capital appear to be national in character, and second, because of the exclusionary nature of the political systems. A "clientelistic" type of redistribution that assures the consent of the dominated is only possible in periods of prosperity. Long before anyone spoke of the "welfare state," that government function was decisive in Latin America.

In fact, historically the center of national power played an original and decisive role in the creation of the social classes. At the extreme one can even say that it was not the dominant classes that created the state as an instrument of domination, but the state that helped to establish those social groups. The latifundista aristocracy and the rural bourgeoisie emerged in the nineteenth century through the distribution of land to friends and clients, to those under obligation, and to those who either possessed the financial means to aid the treasury or the "military" means to support provisional rulers. The grant of inexhaustible public lands facilitated the initial enrichment of a "progressive" or traditionalist leisure class that owed its start to the

state. Later the selective distribution of credit or judicial decisions, as well as favorable business activities involving foreign capital and the state, reinforced a nucleus of property holders that dominated the economy and politics. Whether the issue was a plan for agricultural expansion, the encouragement of immigration to the Southern Cone, industrial development, or labor policy, very few groups of social prominence were independent of such state support. Some owed their establishment to state capital and manipulation, others their organization, still others their self-awareness. It is one of the paradoxes of Latin America (for once, this is true of all those countries) that the productive classes and capitalist elites never fail to manifest an aversion to state control and intervention, however slight, despite the fact that those sectors owe everything to the power of the state.

The paradox is perhaps only apparent, for the role of the state in the redistribution of national revenue is continuous. Even if the economists' famous cake gets larger, redistribution always involves a transfer from the productive sectors to those that are not directly involved in production. And those with economic power rarely view the results of this liberality in terms of social stability and political peace. Faced with populist governments that expand public employment to strengthen and satisfy the middle classes, the rich are defenders of the "minimalist" state and budget-cutting policies. The huge inefficient bureaucracies that are so frequent in Latin America are simply a reflection of the state role in the division of benefits and the cooptation of new social groups, and not just a kind of congenital administrative irrationality in which perverse mañana attitudes are combined with a shameful passion for paperwork. In fact a "public employee" in Latin America is neither the French fonctionnaire nor the British civil servant. If his function appears to be identical, the reasons for his being hired and the origins of his status are radically different. In no European country could one say, as Mario Benedetti did of Uruguay before 1973, that it was not only a country of bureaucrats, but "the only bureaucracy in the world to have become a nation."^[22]

Furthermore, we must recognize that in Latin America economic policy is not a matter of chance. Radical shifts produce

brutal reversals that are carried out by the state. Today it is the Chicago boys against the populists. An administration that is diametrically opposite to its predecessor ruins those who benefited from the largesse of past regimes. Those swings of the pendulum that long antedate 1973 explain the central role of the state, which derives less perhaps from the fragility of civil society than from its inertia and immobility.^[23]

When we speak about the state in Latin America, it is necessary to consider the role of the army. The military coup d'état can be understood as the director and arbiter among the societal sectors. The state, in the form of the coup, acts to preserve a status quo that can be reorganized and even overturned from top to bottom in order to guarantee the one essential requirement, the relations of domination and social and/or political exclusion—even at some sacrifice. Whatever the individual, historical, or national explanations that are given for the cycles of military interventions, they always result in a transfer of revenue and new social redistribution. These regulative coups—the innocence of the term is not meant to deny their crudeness, even their barbarity and ferocity—are therefore first of all actions by the state against social sectors whose power has grown to the point that they threaten government autonomy or endanger its functioning. The apparent desire of the military to free the state from civil society allows the armed forces to accomplish the goals of the state even against its will and acting in its defense. This in no way signifies that the military institution is above class, but that it defends the status quo in accordance with its own logic. For if an army by definition only defends what exists, its logic is that of war and not of social reproduction.

2—
The Establishment of the Military and the Birth of the State

When discussing countries that we think of as new, our ignorance of their past produces distorted interpretations of the present. The exaggerated importance given to the current situations gives rise to a fallacious model of a living and moving reality. Lacking a historical dimension, these "exotic" countries appear to be characterized by improvisation and chaotic caprice. We study monstrosities rather than societies. Belief in these images produces surrealistic visions of a political life that is not subject to laws, or social science, or rational understanding—of a fixed and immovable society, immature people incapable of self-government. Historical fatalism and popular psychology result only in an intellectual void. In Latin America, more than in other areas, a historical perspective is required if we are to overcome partisan mythologies and fantastic caricatures.

Armies also have a history. However, a short-range nominalism produces confusion. What are the armed forces and the military in twenty nations over more than a century? Are we speaking of the same subject over time and space when we refer to the army of this or that country? What is the point of describing a regime as military in these latitudes, or of asserting

that there is strong military influence in a political system? A dictatorship does not necessarily have to be based upon the army, and a military regime is not necessarily established or maintained by means of a high level of repression. Garcia Marquez's "patriarch," the five-star "general of the universe," was intensely interested in his military men, "not because they were the basis of his power, as everyone believed, but because they were his most dangerous natural enemies.^[1]

There is a vast difference between the improvised warrior and a member of the military profession. The "Gaucho Chieftains of the Pampas" are in no way comparable to line officers. A strongman utilizing violence for political ends is fundamentally different from a high-level officer of the armed bureaucracy, even if they both wear gold braid and stars. The cards have been shuffled. Under an identical military visor, there are very different individuals. In societies with different levels of state modernization, social complexity, and functional differentiation, military personnel can come from unlikely different walks of life. For example, a former schoolteacher in twentieth-century Mexico can become a political chief and a leader of men during a revolutionary upheaval (this is a description of Plutarco Elias Calles, who was first a general and then president). A modest municipal clerk may be given the rank of captain at the time that he joins the revolutionary armies (we are referring to the popular General Cárdenas, Calles's successor in the presidency in 1934). Likewise, an army stenographer in Cuba with the rank of sergeant was able to promote himself rapidly in the course of a coup d'état (this was the case with Batista, Fidel Castro's adversary), and experts in court intrigue can rise in the military as a result of patronage: this happened with Lopez Contreras in Venezuela, and it has also occurred in Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. But everywhere the military officer can also be someone trained in a national or foreign military school who is promoted on the basis of merit or seniority in the hierarchy, and who has never done anything else but command troops and carry out general staff exercises.

At the turn of the century and during the first quarter of the twentieth century in certain countries that were most divided by civil war among the oligarchical groups, it was not

unusual for the leaders of the elite and the clan chieftains to use two titles—the civilian title of "doctor" and the military one of "general." Lawyers and warrior chieftains, they gave eloquent testimony to the nonexistence of the state and the preponderance of private interests. Even in societies that were more developed, if not more civilized, the prestige of the uniform was such that togas yielded to arms, and the top levels of the civil service were granted military titles. Miguel Cané, the ambassador of Argentina to Venezuela at the time of Guzmán Blanco (who ruled until 1886), was amazed to find that the minister of foreign affairs, a peaceful civil servant and former director of the chancery archives, bore the rank of general. "He held that rank," the Argentine diplomat tells us, "along with several hundred of his compatriots, but he had received it as a simple decoration, without ever feeling the least desire to exchange his peaceful existence for the agitated world of the military."^[2]

Are they really military men? The boundaries are difficult to determine if one does not establish certain clear criteria. The peasants on horseback in the great plains (the pampa of the La Plata River, the llanos of Venezuela, the north of Mexico) are armed reserves who can easily become the elements of irregular armies. In the nineteenth century, at least, we can speak of a "civilian-agrarian-military" continuum involving the men on horseback.^[3] Until the twentieth century, increasing numbers of private armies belonging to clans or parties in countries as different as the Dominican Republic and Uruguay attested to the fragility, weakness, and backwardness of the state. The national army—it was sometimes in this context only the forces of a caudillo who had seized power at the point of a gun—did not have a monopoly of control over the instruments of violence. The ease with which one could acquire arms of a relatively simple technological level, the absence in this respect of a qualitative difference between professionals and amateurs, between permanent public armed forces and private armed bands, increased the number of violent political mobilizations. The improvement in armament and in heavy arms of a technical nature—the end of the Iron Age—in the twenties (in 1930 in the case of Brazil) rendered this type of military opposition passe. The victories of the guerrilla army in Cuba in 1959 or of a popular party-led army in

1979 in Nicaragua can be explained essentially by the collapse of the ruling regimes and the demoralization of the military. In the case of Nicaragua, this led to both a mass civilian uprising and access of the Sandinista army to sophisticated arms, thanks to aid from foreigners who were opposed to Somoza.

In discussing the diversification and evolution of the military, particular emphasis will be placed on the armies that we call statist —that is, those that are responsible to the state alone and are its military branch. These are the modern standing armies that we know throughout the world. They are also the armies that carry out coups d'état. The degree to which the military apparatus is identified with the state varies. At the opposite extreme, irregular or private armies are totally societal in character, as are also some national armies that have been deeply penetrated by society. A second, more chronological, distinction refers to military professionalization. The appearance of professional cadres whose sole way of life and means of existence is the military institution totally changes the nature of the armed forces. Here too one can distinguish gradations and levels of professionalization. The three characteristics listed by Huntington—technical orientation, discipline, and esprit de corps—^[4] apply to the state armies in which the military "profession" has developed a high degree of autonomy. There is no doubt that there is, if not a break, at least a difference, between a preprofessional and a fully professionalized military. The first has little permanence, and the officers, especially those in the higher grades, are members of a civilian elite who temporarily assume a social role; the modern armies, in contrast, are "total" institutions that aim at self-sufficiency and are characterized by a more or less evident absence of "lateral" relations with society.^[5] We can ask if the same word applies to both realities. It is therefore no doubt a fallacy to speak without qualification of the "Brazilian army" in both 1830 and 1964 as an organization that indeed has evolved but is supposed to have remained essentially the same.

This does not mean that the collective institutional memory does not take into account the heroic past of the improvised or inchoate armed forces that existed at the dawn of national independence. The impact of that glorious past is not unimportant, especially in the area of politics. In Argentina, the native land of the liberator, General San Martin, the "saint of the spear,"

many people believe that one hundred generals created the nation. The streets of Santiago or Sao Paulo are as full of the names of famous or unknown generals as is Buenos Aires. Are they real generals, self-appointed young upstarts, or warrior chiefs recognized by the state and history? It does not matter. In all of South America, in the beginning was the army. However, we must recognize that in the armies of independence that expelled Spain from the continent there were very few military men, even if it is true that once these soldiers left civilian life they became permanent members of the military.

That is why the political history of the Latin American armies—or more precisely of the South American armed forces that today are almost entirely modern state organizations of the Western type—involved three stages closely linked to the emergence and modernization of the state. One phase of this transition was the "professionalization" of the military. Just after the achievement of independence by force of arms there was a period that one can call militarism without the military . We cannot speak of that period of military intervention in politics as we do today, for politics was only war carried out by military means involving fighting men as its protagonists. The liberating armies, when demobilized, often became large companies headed by the improvised and hardened leaders who had led the montoneros in the struggle against the Spaniards and now sought to take power and live on the country. This "predatory militarism" emerged in an institutional void. Those political armies sometimes looked like regular armies, but in fact they were an obstacle to the construction of the state that was to be established in opposition to them.

When the state coalesced without being stabilized, a national army was created; the members of the military during this period were identified with the political administrative personnel and drawn from the ruling classes. The functions of those ruling classes were diversified, and they included a military sector. Nearly all the Spanish-speaking republics, as well as the empire of Brazil, experienced a period of civilian preponderance—that is, one involving a military without militarism .

The third stage we know today. Depending on the country, it began at the turn of the century or in the 1920s. For different reasons analyzed later, the armies at the heart of the

state were modernized, given technical training, and reorganized following the model of the most prestigious military institutions of the time. The military were militarized in order to make the army part of the state, but in the process they were given the organizational and moral resources—especially in the countries that established compulsory military service, "the school for a nation"—to intervene in political life. The officer corps, having developed a sense of its own competence that also was related to the weaknesses of the civil service and an acute sense of national identity, henceforth possessed the means to make its influence felt as a special public organization whose goal and legitimation were based on the ability to kill.

Armies before the State

Morris Janowitz, the American expert on the military, divides the armies of the so-called developing countries into ex-colonial armies, national liberation armies, and armies created after independence. That division, while useful for other continents, is not applicable in Latin America since in varying degrees its national armies possess all three characteristics at the same time; in addition, there are "personal armies" that are difficult to relate to the three classifications. After independence in Bolivia elements of all three were present—that is, the army of liberation of Grand Colombia belonging to Marshal Sucre that had liberated Peru and Ecuador but had been organized for action in the captaincygeneral of Venezuela, the remnants of the former Spanish army, and the Bolivian guerrilla troops who had revolted against the Spaniards. The first attempt to organize a genuine national army in Bolivia was carried out by General Santa Cruz in 1829, but the 5,000 well-disciplined and trained men that he organized formed the first of many "personal armies" that existed in that country throughout the nineteenth century.

It may be appropriate to say a few words about the status of the military in the colonial period in Spanish-and Portuguesespeaking America, especially since some writers do not hesitate to trace the origins of contemporary militarism to the pre-

independence period. In fact, until the eighteenth century the Latin American colonies were only defended by a few detachments of the armies of the mother country and those born in the colonies were strictly excluded from membership. Only the local militias that assured the maintenance of internal order were open to them. However, the reforms carried out by Charles III and Charles IV between 1759 and 1808 in response to the danger from England changed that situation. The Spanish crown reinforced its garrisons on the basis of local recruitment so as to have less need for troops from the Iberian Peninsula. The militias were reorganized and their officers received the same rights as those of the regular army. Because of the insufficient numbers of peninsular Spaniards, the native-born criollos were admitted to the officers' ranks in the army. The privileges that were associated with the "military class" in a status-based and caste society such as that of the colonies had an undeniable attraction.

Thanks to the fuero militar, the group of rights enjoyed by officers and sergeants, the military acquired an enviable and prestigious social standing. Thus, military personnel were not subject to the regular courts but had their own judicial system, whether they were plaintiffs or defendants, and this was true for life if they had served a certain number of years.^[6] Because of those legal privileges many Latin Americans from good families entered the army as cadets, obtained the rank of officer because of certain individual or family services rendered to the crown, or bought their commissions. Because of the fuero militar, the colonial army after the Bourbon reforms became an independent organism within the state that acted as a "self-governing" institution that was answerable only to itself.

This has led some to conclude that the arrogant and overbearing autonomy of the modern armies in a great many Latin American countries is directly related to the privileged status of the military in the colonial period. It is very unlikely, however, that this history had a bearing on the military after the permanent restructuring associated with independence and the repeated breakdowns in the various military organizations. This is all the more true since the reforms were applied especially to the garrisons responsible for the protection of the key ports needed for trade with the mother country and the defense of

the adjacent coasts: essentially Cuba, New Grenada (presentday Colombia), and New Spain (today, Mexico). If we leave Cuba aside we find that these are precisely the countries in which the army is weak and its sovereignty limited, while in Mexico the fueros of the military were only abolished in 1856. However, this is not the essential point. Certainly, because of that reform the Spanish-speaking parts of America experienced a new institution—the army, but the motivations of its leaders were far from militaristic. Into the officer corps came an indolent and inglorious "army" in order to secure the privileges and exemptions that were granted to its members by the céedula real . The result: captains fit only for the salons and colonels with fine uniforms and gold braid. The military career became a way to join the nobility, but these young men had little authority over the enlisted troops who were recruited by force from the dregs of society, and would desert at the least opportunity in order to become highway robbers.

The situation was the same and even clearer in the case of colonial Brazil—epaulettes made an officer a noble. The line officers became members of the nobility as soon as their rank was recognized by the king.^[7] Their descendants were also nobles and could thus become officers, since after 1757 in the Portuguese Empire it was necessary to belong to the nobility to become an officer. That rule continued in Brazil after independence, extending the requirement of membership in the nobility to all military functions. Being an enlisted man was no more attractive than in the Hispanic world. Manhunts and corporal punishment were the basis of recruitment and discipline.

The practically uninterrupted institutional continuity maintained in Brazil during the process of independence reinforces, of course, the historicist argument. Even if we take into account the difference in character between the Brazilian army around 1810 and at the end of the century, we can guess that the arrogance of the military and their messianic sense of superiority were not simply elements that derived from a corporate ethos but rather could be based just as well on an aristocratic nostalgia, the subtle effect of the collective memory of their status under the empire.

In any case the role and influence of the military in the

colonial period were considerable, and not simply a matter of protocol or precedence. Thus the officers in the technical branches and the physicians in the military shared a knowledge of mathematics, civil engineering, or physics that only they possessed. In a way they were the representatives in the colonies of the most enlightened elements of the Bourbon state at the time that the upheaval took place that produced the independent republics.

The Spanish American nations were established in wars of independence. The new republics had an army even when they did not have a state. Those independence armies forged nations out of the ruins of the colonial political institutions. The emancipation struggles against the Spanish crown were devastating and often bloody, even if they were led by and benefited the native-born bourgeoisie that desired freedom to pursue their economic interests—interests that were already dominant, although limited by colonial controls. Those socially conservative revolutions sometimes lasted for ten years—as in the case of Mexico—and divided vast sectors of the population into two camps. The struggles for independence were above all genuine civil wars among opposing ruling groups, and not simply, as the republican mythology claims, a battle waged by patriot heroes supported by a wave of popular sentiment against the regular armies of the mother country. In fact both royalists and patriots engaged in guerrilla warfare, recruited armies by force when necessary, and armed local militias. Since when warfare was prolonged and intensified, they extended the recruitment of troops into the popular classes and broadened their political audience to wider sectors of the population, the upper class, whether royalist or patriot, was quite often carried away by the mobilization that they had produced. In the areas where the victory of the Latin Americans was not rapid, the war became more intense, and racial struggles were superimposed on class hatreds to unleash a brutal anarchy. This was the case in Venezuela where the lower classes and the racially mixed social elements (the Castes ) who had nothing to gain from the independence desired by the native-born elite massacred both the Spanish colonizers and the vanquished "insurgents."

The specter of a racial war hovered over the Spanish colo-

nies in revolt. Long-repressed social and regional tensions emerged in full view. Both the Spaniards and the rebels tried to exploit them for their benefit but never succeeded in controlling them. In Venezuela again—where the social aspects of the war were particularly evident—the royalists recruited mestizos, zambos, and mulattoes, situated at the bottom of the social hierarchy, against the rebels who belonged to the native-born aristocracy. Boves, "the centaur of the llanos," organized his hordes of mixed-blood horsemen for the cause of the king of Spain. And the same men who followed "the Attila of Apure" could be found among the troops of "General" Paez, the hero of independence. The frightening picture of the civil war that is given to us by the positivist Venezuelan historians involves a comparison with "the Roman world at the time of the barbarian invasions." Is this a biased exaggeration that reflects the great fear of the property holders of popular insurrection and racial war? Of course, but the violent overturn of the colonial equilibrium that was partially maintained against the plebeian danger in the other viceroyalties by agreements among the adversaries to guarantee the right of property released centrifugal forces, broke down social structures, and shook up social hierarchies everywhere.^[8]

The collapse of Spanish institutions left the area free for the warlords. The fragmentation of the territorial and administrative units of the colonial period resulted from the nature of the war carried on against the colonial power. It was also facilitated by the economic organization of Hispanic America at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The importance of the agricultural production of foodstuffs, the self-sufficient forms of social life, the difficulty of transportation despite the penetration of the market economy under the aegis of Great Britain, and the long history of the export of its products to Europe, resulted in societies in which precapitalist traits were politically prevalent. The archaic character of the relations of production—which one author has called "the reactionary method of capitalist development"^[9] —accentuated these characteristics still more. In addition, like the precapitalist societies described by Georg Lukács, in the first quarter of the last century in Latin America "the autonomy of the parties is much greater because their economic interdependence is more limited and less developed than in

capitalism," because "the weaker the role of the circulation of goods is in the life of a society, . . . the less the unity and organizational cohesion of the society and the state has a genuine foundation in the real life of the society."^[10] Political disintegration has its roots in the economy, but expresses itself in warfare. A generalized state of war was the normal situation on a more or less permanent basis for the Hispanic republics at the dawn of their independence.

Armies against the State

That underlying anarchy of the postcolonial societies of the subcontinent produced the age of the caudillos. While certainly a man at arms, the caudillo is the opposite of the career military man. The career officer is the product of the workings of a bureaucracy. The caudillo is produced by the institutional decomposition of society. Once victory was achieved, in most countries around 1825, the leaders of the emancipating armies quickly transformed themselves into caudillos, sometimes carving out a fiefdom, but most often making efforts to gain control of "national" power. More often the victorious armies followed their leaders across the continents seeking their fortunes without any concern for national frontiers that were still fluid and existed only in theory. The generals sought the throne; their men, booty and an easy life. The civilian elites that had initiated the revolution in order to consolidate their power and serve their interests began to complain of the arrogance of those veterans who had gained their stripes on the field of battle, and the armies were a considerable expense for the states that were still being established. It was not rare for half the expense of the new republics to be devoted to the military budget.

In some countries the "voracious militarism" which was the result of a period of generalized violence took the place of a political system. Since other institutions no longer existed, the army was everything, since in almost every case there "was no power superior to that of arms" at the end of the wars of independence.^[11] Thus from 1825 until 1879 Bolivia had a sinister series of "barbarian caudillos" whose intemperance and pictur-

esque megalomania have become legendary. They emerged from the "liberating" troops to form personal armies in order to seize the government and plunder its riches. This was the case with the popular Isidoro Belzú (1848–1855) who destroyed the elite army of Santa Cruz and formed his own force made up of cholos and representatives of the lower classes in order to despoil an aristocracy that despised him as an opportunist of mixed blood. Again, there is the blustering Mariano Melgarejo, the antihero of Bolivian history. If one believes the thousands of anecdotes contained in popular tradition, he was an outrageous tyrant who seized the presidency by force in 1864.

The struggles among the civilians and the oppositions of interests and ideologies, when they were not arbitrated by the veterans of independence, likewise led to the force of arms. Whether the factions were liberal or conservative, supporters of unity or federalism, they established party-armies to mount an assault on power. Against the "official" party or the "situation," as they termed it, the opposition had no other means of expression than an uprising. The monopoly of collective violence did not exist. A weak state controlled nothing. Private, personal, or pseudopublic armies prevented the emergence and establishment of a state apparatus. One can even say that nearly everywhere in Hispanic America, sometimes down to the end of the nineteenth century, the armies that formed the nation prevented the construction of the state.

The crisis of independence and the period of anarchy that it initiated involving the fragmentation of the former Spanish empire, as well as the militarization of the new political units, plunged the subcontinent into what Halperin Donghi has called "a long waiting period."^[12] From an economic point of view the instability that followed the ravages of war was not favorable to successful integration into the world market. When for economic reasons the new international division of labor that was dominated by England encouraged the involvement of countries that produced primary products, a political truce was imposed in the nations of the subcontinent. To enter "the age of economics" and to profit from the enormous European demand and the improvement in transatlantic transportation, it was necessary to construct the state. If the economic bases permitted

the emergence of a dominant group that was capable of carrying out the great transformation required by the neocolonial order, it was compelled first to end decentralized militarism and the revolts of the legionnaires. The economic modernization of which the exporters of primary products were the guarantors and the beneficiaries could not take place without a state monopoly on violence and the establishment of a new type of army. "Peace and administration," "order and progress," were the slogans of the moment for the positivists. General Roca, the constitutional president of Argentina (1880–86 and 1898–1904), was not the only one to think that "revolutions—that is political uprisings—are not quoted on the Stock Exchange in London." For the dominant supporters of material—and at times cultural, but never social—progress who embraced dependence on the Western metropolitan countries, it was important to disarm civil society and to demilitarize political life so as to produce, export, and inspire the confidence of foreign capital.

The goal of state building was attained slowly in the countries of South America. Some countries of Central America and the Caribbean (such as Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic) were torn by permanent convulsions in the first third of the twentieth century without succeeding in establishing a recognized political structure that possessed a minimum of consistency and permanence. Elsewhere the process of demilitarization followed very different—at times unexpected—paths, as in Ecuador. It was also facilitated by the lack of capacity of even predatory military men to justify their existence, that is, to make war.

These turbulent military men, these noisy veterans, these saber-rattlers (among them "the heroes of July or December," "supreme protectors," "benefactors" or "restorers") who desired national recognition—that is, benefits from the public treasury—did not fail to bring discredit upon themselves when faced with a foreign enemy. General Santa Anna, one of the most extravagant of the caudillos and for thirty years the scourge of his country, Mexico, demonstrated a military incapacity that was at least equal to his political adroitness when he faced a war with the United States in 1847 resulting from the secession of Texas. This admirer of Napoleon and devotee of

cockfights was four times dictator and four times overthrown; he also lost three undisciplined and poorly trained armies to the Yankee military forces, allowing the Americans to occupy Mexico City and dismember the territory of the nation. The seriousness of the disaster destroyed the prestige of the army and a few years later the exorbitant privileges of the officers inherited from the colonial period were suppressed.

The armies of Peru in power without interruption until 1872 and those of Bolivia that occupied the government—if not the country—when the War of the Pacific against Chile broke out in 1879, went down before the offensive of a country in which the military had been controlled by civilians for nearly fifty years. In spite of certain heroic episodes, Peru, because of its defeat, lost all its rights to the rich mining province of Tarapacá, and Bolivia was henceforth deprived of an outlet to the sea.

Chile represents the best example of the construction of the state against the army. The troubles at the time of independence, described by official historians as "anarchy," were shorter but no less intense than in the neighboring countries. But while five revolutions broke out in the three years before the battle of Lircay (1830), the last confrontation between the factions, the country experienced an era of political stability from the time of the adoption of the conservative and authoritarian constitution of 1833 that contrasted with the disorganization that characterized all of Spanish America at that time. The defeat of the pipiolos, who were liberals, rabid republicans, and federalists, by their adversaries, the pelucones, who were conservatives and centralists who sought an orderly government under the tutelage of the Spanish Basque aristocracy, was also a victory of civilians over the army. At Lircay civilian militias wiped out a part of the army that was linked at the outset with the liberals. Portales became a minister and organized the conservative republic that was characterized by a surprising equilibrium lasting until 1891. That "Portalian Republic," with its strong executive, was able to impose civilian control through thorough purges of the liberal elements in the officer corps, as well as of all those who had demonstrated a tendency to pronunciamentos and uprisings. To counterbalance the army which he had reduced to 3,000 men in 1837,^[13] Portales reorga-

nized a civilian militia that included as many as 25,000 men. The continuing "pacification" of the southern frontier with the Araucanian Indians and the wars against the alliance of Peru and Bolivia (1836–39 and 1879–83), as well as fear of Argentine power to the east at the end of the century, also contributed to keeping the Chilean military out of politics. In a strange irony of history, General Pinochet and his ideologues, who today call for the reestablishment of the authoritarian republic of Portales, seem to forget that the man who restored the "principle of authority" and who created the Chilean state had as his primary objective the demilitarization of public life.

In Peru the situation was very different. The most dynamic ruling groups struggled with only limited success to establish civilian supremacy. From 1821 until 1872 military leaders succeeded one another in power practically without interruption. Even the idea of a nonmilitary government seemed bizarre or Utopian. It even reached the point that a "procivilian party" was established with a moderate program advocating the alternation of civilians and military men in power. With the support of this party Manuel Pardo became the first constitutional president of Peru in 1872, having been elected by the congress after a popular revolt had driven the military from power. Pardo reduced military spending and created a national guard that was larger than the army in order to neutralize it, but Peru's defeat in the War of the Pacific against Chile provided the opportunity for the praetorians to take their revenge. Following the customary pattern, the defeated army, stronger because of the blood that had been shed in vain and because of a few individual acts of heroism, blamed its reverses on a lack of equipment and on the incompetence of the civilian "politicians" who, according to the military, were ambitious, corrupt, and lacking in national feeling and a sense of the general interest. Three years after the catastrophe that included occupation of Lima by Chilean troops, General Andres Caceres, the hero of La Breña, one of the battles with Chile, took over the presidency in a coup d'état in 1886.

Caceres ruled with an iron hand. The people quickly grew tired of his arbitrary government, while the financial oligarchy that was linked to English capital complained that the restored

military did not recognize the laws of progress and it denounced their authoritarian statism in economics. The large guano and nitrate interests that favored laissez faire and general concessions to foreign companies opposed the government. Demilitarization was considered a necessity by the defenders of liberalism and of the participation of Peru in the world economy. The "civilianists" supported Nicolas de Pierola, a liberal and a former proponent of state direction of the economy, when he organized civilian troops and rose up against the government. The result of the war that lasted several months was that the regular army was defeated by poorly equipped civilians with no military training. Piérola took control of Lima in 1895 and occupied the presidency—a new humiliation for the Peruvian army. The civilians stayed in power for twenty years. However, the oligarchy and the dominant groups would not abandon their deep-seated antimilitarism until 1930.

The most surprising case of political consolidation against a dominant militarism is that of Ecuador in the middle of the last century. The Ecuadorian process was associated with the name of one man: Gabriel García Moreno, the creator of the "Republic of the Sacred Heart of Jesus," the amazing leader of a theocratic state, revered in France by the Christian Brothers religious order. In fact, he was a politician who used the church to build the state.

From 1830 until 1845 Ecuador was under the boot of a military regime that retained absolute control of the country. However, a regional and political division emerged involving opposition between the coast and the highlands. In 1852 General Urbina negotiated an alliance between the army and the liberal commercial bourgeoisie of the coast. When his government adopted some liberal measures to help the peasants in the highlands, the conservative landowners in the interior resisted and then revolted. Local uprisings threatened the country with dissolution. Autonomous governments were formed in Guayaquil, the coastal capital; in Quito, the national capital in the highlands; and in Cuenca and Loja on the high Andean plateaus. Peru took advantage of the situation to occupy part of the territory of its neighbor, and the principal port was blockaded.

At that moment García Moreno, an energetic and unusual

man with a background in chemistry and canon law, and a strange personality that is much discussed by historians of Ecuador, was able to seize power and took forceful action to resist the centrifugal tendencies. This man—who is considered by some to be "the avenger and martyr for Christian righteousness"^[14] —appears in the eyes of his detractors as a false saint or simply as a religious fanatic and a sadist who loved repression. In fact, García Moreno was pitiless in his repression since he thought that he was carrying out a divine mission. He consecrated the country to the Sacred Heart in 1873, the same year that Paris was constructing the basilica of the same name. However, since he was aware of the danger in which the state had been in 1859, he soon made efforts to modernize the country and to centralize power in order to overcome the regional and sectoral divisions. He built highways (with forced labor), schools (for the Jesuits and Christian Brothers), introduced technical education (but closed the university), initiated large-scale public works, and reformed the fiscal and financial system. For some, he is the creator of modern Ecuador. In his effort to modernize he could not rely on the army, since it was a decentralizing force, or on parties, which were nonexistent. There remained the church, the only national institution—as García Moreno said, the "sole link among the Ecuadorians."

The paradoxical aspects of the situation were evident. While Garcia Moreno's liberal enemies, led by writer Juan Montalvo, exalted cosmopolitanism in opposition to the obscurantist character of the government, Garcia Moreno appealed to an ultramontane church to help him to transform the country. Furthermore, it was the church of the Syllabus of Errors of the Modern World to which their theologian chemist entrusted the responsibility of promoting science and progress and granted total monopoly control as a single party. Garcia Moreno built up the state against "thirty years of militarism," the formula of the Peruvian García Calderon, the ardent admirer of all the "great Latin American leaders."^[15] However, this did not prevent this "theocrat," imbued with his divine mission, from sending Ecuadorian officers to Prussia. Also, faced with the anarchy of 1860, Moreno sought without success to establish a French protectorate over Ecuador.

A Militarism without the Military?

Once the postindependence anarchy was overcome, the Latin American states were pacified and the social structures and the place in the world market could be assured; these turbulent armies gave rise to the modern forces that were to be the central support and guarantee of the state. In the age of the caudillos, permanent state armies with a monopoly on the control of violence were a rarity in the continent, and officers were adventurers and warriors rather than military men. Nevertheless, there already were some professionals who tried to create an embryonic military organization. In this respect we can contrast two dissimilar figures who symbolized the career officers involved in the wars of independence: San Martín in Buenos Aires, the "liberator" of Argentina, Chile, and Peru, and Miranda in Caracas, whose policies are viewed by Venezuelan historians as the precursor of emancipation.

San Martín, who came to Spain at the age of eight and entered the college of nobles in Madrid, was incorporated in the Murcia regiment in 1789 and thus followed the normal route to become a Spanish officer. When he retired from the Spanish army in 1811, he was a lieutenant-colonel. Returning to his native land in 1812, he organized the Army of the Andes, the spearhead of the emancipation of the Southern Cone, following the best military models. This was very different from the pattern of the montonera . Unity of command, hierarchic structure, division into branches and services, uniform equipment—all of the specific characteristics of a regular army—were to be found there. This army included four infantry battalions, five squadrons of grenadier cavalry, and an artillery unit that were divided into three corps, each with its own general staff. In addition, General San Martin was not the only professional soldier in his army.

Miranda was the son of a tailor who went to Spain, bought a captain's commission in the Princess Regiment after some military study, and took part in 1774 in the Moroccan campaign in the ranks of the Spanish army. He served in Florida against England and reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel before he was stripped of his commission because of illegal trading activi-

ties involving contraband in slaves and merchandise in the North Atlantic. His role as adventurer in the service of the idea of independence dates from that inglorious turn of events. A general without a country or an army, he went to Pitt, Catherine the Great, and the leaders of the French Revolution to plead his cause and to look for support for the emancipation of his country from Spanish rule. Dictator for a brief period and defeated generalissimo, he was finally handed over to the Spaniards by his own officers.

More often, however, the leaders of the independence armies had never been in the regular army or received a military education. These men were leaders of bands or factions—the captain of a montonera of ragged peasants is happy to take on a high military rank. The caudillos of the troubled period of early Latin American independence were civilians who acquired some military experience in the course of the uprisings that they initiated. It was no different a century later during the Mexican Revolution. John Reed, in his penetrating and colorful description of the this uprising, has left us precise observations on this subject. Thus writing about Venustiano Carranza, who became president of the republic in 1915, Reed observes, "When Madero's revolution broke out, Carranza went to war in a totally medieval fashion. He armed the peones who worked his lands and took their lead as a feudal lord would have done . . . ."^[16]

The officers in this kind of army, with their troops dressed in serapes and ponchos, were entirely ignorant of the art of war. Former soldiers, fighters by vocation, they were characterized by courage, ferocity, fearlessness, and endurance. If they did not die in battle, they were promoted rapidly. They secured their commissions in action when they distinguished themselves. Emerging in epic times, they forged a hierarchy that was very loose and easy to enter. Latorre, first a general, then dictator in Uruguay, was believed to be insensitive to pain. El Chacho Peñaloza, the caudillo of the plains of the Rioja district in northern Argentina, obtained the rank of captain for capturing the enemy cannons with his lasso. Other more politically oriented officers in less violent periods owed their epaulettes to their "revolutionary merits," that is, their friendship with a leader whom they had assisted in seizing power. Named in an

arbitrary way, they had no technical formation. In this kind of army, discipline and hierarchy count less than loyalty and confidence. John Reed says, referring to the officer in the revolutionary armies, "Their role did not go beyond fighting at the head of their troops. All the soldiers considered the general who had recruited them as a feudal overlord. They were devoted to him entirely and no other officer from another group could exercise authority over them."^[17] Thus, we can understand why the division between private and state armies was not very clear, all the more so since military schools existed only on paper and membership in the national army was demonstrated by wearing a uniform.

The officers were not a caste, since they did not even form a body with clearly defined rules for admission. The militarism of that period exhibited different social characteristics according to the country, but followed the same general pattern. Most often the hierarchy in the military was modeled on that of society. The caudillos, the generals, were the large landowners or their sons, the notables. But violence and the emphasis on courage and daring were democratizing factors that opened the way to prestige, status, and power.

Facundo Quiroga, the caudillo general in the province of La Rioja, was the son of a grand hacendado and inherited the position of captain of the provincial militia. Later and until the end of the century, if the Argentine officers were formed into units, it was necessary for an officer candidate to have solid family recommendations. For those who were well off, the military profession very often was not a permanent position. Armies were dissolved after the campaigns and the notables who were involved then considered that occupation as an honorific service rather than as a profession. Elsewhere, in more fluid and disturbed societies with no defined ruling class where "barbarian caudillos" succeeded one another, militarism was a genuine process of social mobility. Thus in Bolivia, the popular Tata Belzú,^[18] a mestizo of very humble origin who at the age of fifteen had joined the revolutionary army of Upper Peru, was a fighter who came to the presidency in 1848. Melgarejo, who was said to have become a member of the infantry at the age of nine and was a clerk for a notary before becoming a "general,"

seems to have been characterized more by his personal excesses than by his popularity among the Indian masses. But this alcoholic old soldier, who was assassinated by his brother-in-law, was also a mestizo whose courage resulted in rapid military promotions and brought him to the summit of power. It is not certain, as is said, that he had his shirt executed or that he declared war on Prussia in 1870, or that "Let me enjoy life" was his political program, but the anecdotes remain in the mythology. In power for seven years, sensual and violent, perverse and unscrupulous, always ready to sell the territories belonging to the Indian communities and tracts of nationally owned land, he gave birth to a word in the Bolivian political vocabulary, melgarejismo, meaning a mixture of debauchery, excess, and militarism. It is a word that has been in frequent use since his time in the altiplano .

Even what is called the period of militarismo in Uruguay—that is, the dictatorial governments of Lorenzo Latorre, Maximo Santos, and his confederates, between 1876 and 1886—only involved soldiers of fortune and professional warriors. This kind of militarism is different from that of the praetorian dictator. Power is in the hands not of an institution but rather of "military heroes." Before becoming captain-general, Santos was a cattle driver. However, it was as a result of this that the Uruguayan army as a body developed an interest in becoming professionalized. In 1885 the Military Academy was founded for the educational formation of officers, and thus began the process of technification and modernization of a permanent army.

It was an army with special and somewhat contradictory characteristics. While it was a military institution that was politically partisan and therefore in this respect prestatist, nineteenth-century Uruguayan "militarism" did not resemble the violent and destructive anarchy of some of its neighboring countries where the "military" made (and unmade) the law. Latorre and Santos established order in the country, guaranteed the security of trade and property, and forbade vagabondage at a time when the large landholders needed a period of peace in order to produce meat and wool for the European market. Along with the introduction of the telegraph and the railroad, those governments presided over "the death of the gaucho"

and a revolution in the countryside that involved enclosure of the fields, thanks to the introduction of barbed wire, el alambrado . Centralization of power thus was linked to integration in the world market. Militarism here seems to reinforce the state rather than acting as an obstacle to its establishment.

It is evident that a true militarism requires a stable and efficient state, and it generally follows the establishment of the state in Latin America. In Uruguay, however, the two phenomena appeared at the same time, which is why the militarism of that country was not destined to last long. This was especially true because from the time of the civil wars that produced that buffer state, the military forces were linked to the two parties—the Colorados and the Blancos or National party that were born on the field of battle in 1836. Until the war with Paraguay, the first foreign war in which Uruguay participated (1864–1870), a national army practically did not exist. The caudillos who fought for power in the course of the interminable civil wars were linked from the beginning with one or the other of Uruguay's large neighbors. Brazil and Argentina coveted their "La Plata" or "eastern" province, respectively. The Colorado party was allied with the first, the Blancos were supported by the other. However, for historical reasons that we cannot discuss here, the national army after 1850 was largely Colorado while the national guard in Montevideo and the coast was Blanco. The political preponderance of the Colorados led to armed uprisings by the Blanco National party, the last of which took place in 1904 and ended with the death of the Blanco caudillo, Aparico Saravia. The Blancos subsequently agreed not to engage in armed struggle against the dominant Colorado party. The agreement also contained military provisions concerning the rights of the officers of the "revolutionary army"; these did not change the political coloration of the institution but demonstrated its lack of autonomy with respect to the system of political parties.

In all the cases we have described, however, military control and the development of the coercive apparatus did not, as in the case of Europe in the classic age, increase the possibilities of state building. If, as Samuel Finer says, large existing or emerging standing armies reinforce the extractive and coercive

capability of political power, thus enabling dominant forces to build a state,^[19] in dependent nations with externally oriented economies the extraction-coercion cycle did not occur. Except for its role in the budget, the army had no fiscal responsibilities, since government revenues came principally from customs and international trade. The significance of this lack should not be underestimated.

The Military without Militarism: The Birth of the Armed Forces of the State

The movement from temporary ad hoc armies to the standing army, from the private armies of the caudillos to the army that is the monopoly of the state, did not take place everywhere in Latin America. The transfer of allegiance from the leader to the impersonal figure of the state is not a simple or spontaneous process. It involves many convergent factors. For one, the needs of the economy seem to have been decisive in determining the degree to which the skeleton of a state apparatus emerged. The growth of externally oriented social forces integrated into the world market at the end of the century presupposed political and social stability, and the establishment of the state conformed to the interests of the exporting ruling classes. The need for socioeconomic organization, for the establishment of an infrastructure, and for the expansion of services and of the public administration combined to build the state. On the other hand, in the nations that did not succeed in integrating themselves into international trade at this period, and therefore lacked export products that would permit the rise of a strong bourgeoisie and the appearance of an established social power, the crystallization of the state was slow in coming. In such nations civil convulsions were more prolonged and a national army never developed beyond the stage of a private garrison with a state facade. The case of Nicaragua from the nineteenth century until the era of Somoza illustrates that pattern, as does that of Honduras at the beginning of the twentieth century and down to the establishment of the banana enclave.

The economy was not the only influence in this direction.

In some countries the most professionalized sectors of the officer corps demanded the establishment of a regular army that was large and well equipped and possessed a monopoly on the control of violence. Corporate values and the military ethic gradually opened the way. The numerous disagreements between neighboring republics required armies that were conventionally trained and equipped and benefited from qualified recruitment. The European models (and their fellow travelers, the arms merchants) impelled them in the same direction. Nationalist feeling grew within the armies at the same time that it was declining among bourgeoisies that had become cosmopolitan and directed toward the outside world. In addition, the utilization of the military forces to wipe out major internal dissidence among the civilians, as in Brazil in 1896 and 1914,^[20] made the officers aware that they were the guarantors of the status regni—that is, of the state—and that therefore they deserved special budgetary and legislative provisions. As symbols of national identity, the armies—whether victors or vanquished—acquired a special significance in the foreign wars in which they participated, few as they were.

The long war with Paraguay (1864–1870)—murderous as it was because of bad logistics and the deplorable equipment of the units—marked a turning point in the history of the Brazilian army. Henceforth the army leaders, having become the "defenders of the fatherland," had an important influence. The War of the Pacific (1879–83) had similar effects in different contexts in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia. The demands of enlighted officers went from the reorganization of the units to the establishment of universal military service, and included the purchase of modern arms and increased institutional independence.

The first state armies that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century were very dissimilar, but they possessed a certain number of common elements that distinguish them from the modern armies that succeeded them. These included mediocre quality and difficulty in recruitment, a lack of professional formation of the officers, and promotion of officers still largely based on personal discretion. The true size of those standing armies was generally well below the theoretical figures cited by the bureaucracies and in the budgets. The enlisted

men, again in theory, were volunteers under contract for variable—generally long—periods. In fact, the normal practice was forced recruitment (by lasso, it was said, in Brazil). Most of those engaged were the product of impressment. The armies thus drained off the social scum of the country, the unlucky ones who had been taken in the roundups by the recruiting sergeants, the unemployed, and the victims of natural catastrophes, such as the nordestinos fleeing the drought in northeastern Brazil. Men were sent to military service as if to prison if they displeased the social or political authorities, or lacked a "master" who was responsible for them. In some countries even the common-law criminals were put directly into the army, as was the case in Uruguay and Argentina.

Discipline was imposed on the enlisted men by corporal punishment. The officers were more prison wardens than intellectuals in uniform. In Brazil, under the Prussian disciplinary code of Count von Lipp dating from 1763, whippings were imposed for the least infractions. These punishments were abolished in principle in 1874 but they continued to be applied in the army and navy down to the twentieth century. In 1903 the soldiers in the fortress of Santa Cruz in the bay of Guanabara revolted against these conditions and massacred the officers responsible for their sufferings. In 1910 a revolt of the crews broke out in the navy against the severity and inhuman character of the disciplinary system. The atrocious situation of soldiers was identical in other countries. A Uruguayan wrote, "I deplore as much as anyone the terrible necessity of corporal punishment which is prescribed by our military laws . . . but take a look at the enlisted personnel of our army. They include a large number of African slaves [this is written in the 1850s] who are lazy and used to harsh rules . . . and still worse, fugitives from the gallows, drawn from the jails. . . . I wish we could abolish corporal punishment as a measure that is just and very appropriate for the level of freedom and civilization that our republic has achieved, but first let us reform the personnel of the army by purging it of criminals and the dregs of society."^[21]

Revolts, "military crimes" (the term used by the press for a high level of criminality not always limited to the barracks), and a large number of desertions all characterized the most ad-

vanced Latin American armies at the beginning of the century. The people avoided military service by any means and cases of self-mutilation were not unusual.^[22] In Brazil in 1862 the minister of war estimated that in time of peace the army lost a third of its membership every year. Even after the introduction of conscription by the drawing of lots the number of draft evaders remained very high, amounting to about one-fifth of those subject to the draft.^[23] Draft evasion still exists today in countries where military service is obligatory in theory but where in practice roundups of young men of military age (la recluta ) supplement the voluntary appearances required by law. This was the case not long ago in many rural areas of Peru and Colombia. It goes on in the same way today in several countries in Central America.

The procedures of "reverse selection" and the avoidance of "military obligations" affect the place of the army in the nation and the social status of the officers. Only those who cannot avoid it serve as enlisted men or in the navy. A Brazilian writer spoke at the beginning of the century of "the monstrous divorce between the army and the people." The type of recruitment is reflected in the racial composition of the armed forces: the enlisted men are largely Indian in the Andean countries, and they speak Quechua or Aymara in Bolivia and Peru. In Argentina they are mainly mestizo, and in Brazil the navy crews were 50 percent black and 30 percent mulatto at the beginning of the twentieth century. The war with Paraguay was a massacre of Africans. Although slaves had been exempt from military service up to that point, the slavemasters of the northeast sold their slaves to the army as cannon fodder. It is said that Argentina was "whitened" by that war since it sent the battalions of pardos to the front lines, thus permanently solving its black "problem."

The recruitment of officers by recommendation or family connections, even according to aristocratic schemes that were more or less respected, as in Brazil, created an enormous gap between the officers and the enlisted men—a veritable abyss that was not only hierarchical but also social, ethnic, and sometimes linguistic. Added to the particularistic and nonmeritocratic nature of access to the officers' ranks, that social distance

increased civilian control over the army. The officer in the majority of the "old armies" of the continent—a misbehaving son, the castoff of a penniless notable, or the humble protegé of a powerful man—was generally trained by the head of an army corps. Badly educated and without great theoretical foundation, he owed his promotions not to his professional qualities but to personal connections, to the favor of a civilian politician, or to the vagaries of political life in which armed action often played a decisive role. The division between the dominant civilian groups and the military corps had not yet occurred. The institutional autonomy of the Latin American armies was still very weak. The military were still very civilian and thus in a subordinate position. Professional esprit de corps played a much less important role than loyalty to political networks. It was the professionalization of the military that was to permit it to regulate itself as an institution and that freed the officer corps from control by civilian elites.

In particular, the creation of a system of military education increased the homogeneity of the officer corps, creating a separate institution and developing a sense of military identity and later of military superiority. The instruction of commissioned and noncommissioned officers in specialized schools, cut off from civilian surroundings, values, and references, both raised the level of knowledge and diffused the military ethic. The existence of a specialized military educational system also introduced methods of recruitment in which civilians had no part. The military school officer is chosen by his peers, and political recommendation hardly has any role to play. Under the traditional system of recruitment the officers did not form an autonomous group that was socially distinct from the ruling classes. Lacking the cohesion that results from passing through the same common experience, the military was part of the established elite and shared its divisions, with corresponding limitations on its power. The civilians had no difficulty in exercising control. The obligatory passage of officers through military schools of good quality, therefore, was to give military society the moral, ideological, and institutional resources to shake off civilian tutelage. But that process was to be a slow one, even in the countries that had long-established military academies.

The dates of the creation of the officers' schools in the nineteenth century range from 1840 in Brazil to 1896 in Peru. In Bolivia the Military College was founded after several attempts in Sucre in 1891, while Uruguay had its Academy in 1885 and the Polytechnical School in Guatemala dates from 1873. Argentina, for its part, created a Military College in 1869 during the presidency of Sarmiento, but the majority of officers did not attend that institution until the great military reforms of 1891. The same was true in Brazil, where a distinction was made between officers who had graduated from the school and the tarimbeiros formed among the troops and on the field who had not received any theoretical education. These field officers criticized the book learning that the cadets at the school of Praia Vermelha had received, especially after the positivist educational reforms introduced in 1890 by Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhaes. The new study plan was attacked for its encyclopedic dilettantism, for teaching sociology rather than military subjects, and for creating "lawyers in uniform" rather than developing a martial spirit.

Civilian Preponderance and Military Modernization

The eclipse of the warriors in the countries in which a coherent leading group imposed its hegemony began a period of civilian domination and political stability. The caudillos were brought under control because of the requirements of capitalism; the modern armed forces that resulted had not yet acquired the institutional resources necessary for them to intervene. Military men had power, but the military were not in power. This did not prevent strongmen of a more or less military background in some countries from taking control of the state and establishing themselves as dictators or irremovable patriarchs for life, such as Cipriano Castro (1899–1908) or Juan Vicente Gomez (1908–1935) in Venezuela, or Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) in Mexico—to mention only a few.

In Argentina the army was involved in containing or pacifying the rebellious Indians to the south of Buenos Aires until the

"campaign of the desert" ended that threat, and beginning in 1880 opened up immense territories to cultivation. The civil wars and the rules for recruitment did not separate the officers from the national elites, and still less made them independent of those in power. General Roca, who was president twice after having been the hero of the conquest of the southern territories in 1879, exhibits in his career the typical profile of an old army officer. While he was still in secondary school he joined the national troops fighting the secession of the province of Buenos Aires, won his lieutenant's bars at Cepeda (1859), and took part in the battle of Pavón two years later—two important events in the history of the Argentine civil wars. He became a colonel at the age of twenty-nine as a result of his action against the uprising of a provincial caudillo, and a general following his victory over a rebellion led by "General" Mitre, a former president. Yet until 1880 the civil wars that established the political physiognomy of the country were struggles among civilians, and from 1860 until 1930 Argentina experienced an uninterrupted succession of civilian governments.

In Chile the order created by Portales lasted until 1891. The short civil war between groups within the oligarchy that led to the suicide of President Balmaceda did not interrupt the continuity of civilian rule. The army remained loyal to the president despite the desertion of groups of officers, while the navy supported the Congress, the banks, and the English interests that were hostile to the nationalist policy of Balmaceda. However, the military did not have the initiative and the crisis only resulted in the weakening of the executive and the establishment of a parliamentary regime.

In Bolivia the defeat in the War of the Pacific totally discredited the military who had been more interested in controlling political life than in guaranteeing the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country. A civilian era began that extended from 1884 until 1934 during which period the parties of the oligarchy and regional interests fought for power, sometimes with arms; however, the army as a corporate body remained outside of politics. While the mining economy spurred by the demand for silver and tin in the twentieth century guaranteed the prosperity and power of the local bourgeoisies, the Conservative, Lib-

eral, and Republican parties succeeded one another at the head of the state. Thanks to the mining revenues, the army that had been demobilized and substantially reduced in size was to be transformed from top to bottom, as one of the measures that modernized the state apparatus. It remained, however, aloof and bitter, not far from power but not participating in it in an institutional way.

Brazil, with its continent-wide size and its distinctive independence process, should be given special mention since the decisive participation of the military in the fall of the empire and the establishment of the republic in 1889 seems to run counter to the demilitarization of Spanish America at the time. In fact, the establishment of the republic was preceded by a "military question" that the empire could not resolve, but which was more an indication of the discontent of the military than of its political strength. Under the empire the army was a second-rank military organization since it did not possess a monopoly of arms or of legal violence, thus demonstrating the weakness of the federal state. In internal matters the central power essentially exercised the function of an arbiter;^[24] the dominant local groups enjoyed power that they were not willing to share. For them the central administration was suspect, especially the army. The 1891 constitution, which was made to measure for the provincial oligarchic groups, gave great autonomy to the states and limited the possibilities of federal control. Brazil at that time was a federation of twenty nations, to the disgust of the military defenders of the state who were hostile to centrifugal forces. The landed oligarchies who governed the country were distrustful of the army. Only the National Guard, which was not dissolved until 1918, had the rulers' confidence—since they largely controlled it. This taxpayer-based force that recruited its enlisted men from among the active and productive citizens and its officers from the upper classes appeared in many ways to be a counter-army. In fact the army drew its membership from marginal groups, the elements that were excluded because of their income level from service in the National Guard. The officers of the guard who bought their commissions and for a time were even elected by their men were always those with local social authority. The large land-

owner was often a doctor (in law) and a colonel (in the national guard) to the point that the word coronel became synonymous in the northeast with a notable landowner. That bourgeois army, serving as an electoral militia when needed, was an important element in the establishment of the Brazilian political system—it provided the forum for an exchange of services between the state and private power.^[25] The army itself continued after the dissolution of the national guard to be a secondary organization that was counterbalanced by the public forces of the states.

These militarized police forces, which sometimes possessed artillery and aviation and were trained by European military missions (as was the case with the public forces of Sao Paulo at the beginning of the century), did not depend on the federal government. The governors could use them as they saw fit and sometimes they did not hesitate to employ them against the national government. The central government only took control of these petty local armies very gradually. In 1937 the military police were placed under the command of army officers, and in 1964 they were finally subordinated directly to the army general staff. But in spite of the insistence of the officers, the army was long numerically inferior to the police forces of the various states of the Brazilian federation.

In order to establish the superiority of the army, the Brazilian officers demanded the strict application of the law requiring universal obligatory service which they had finally obtained in 1916 as a delayed compensation for having participated in the overthrow of the empire. However, the local potentates continued to interfere in the functioning of the institution, blocking the recruitment of the men, and influencing the selection of garrison commanders. In addition, political influence and favoritism were heavily involved in promotions. To advance in the hierarchy it was necessary to have good "connections," and merit or professional qualifications still counted for very little at the beginning of the century.

Badly regarded, badly paid, badly equipped, and badly trained, the Brazilian military, which under the empire had been far from the corridors of power and had held unpopular views—it was opposed to slavery and in favor of republicanism—

little by little acquired influence, although they still thought of themselves as mistreated and neglected. Since a career in the military was not attractive, recruitment became more and more internalized; this in turn increased the separation of the military from the civilian elites and also contributed to the development of the esprit de corps that shaped military education. The officers who had graduated from the military schools began to look down on the civilian bachareis who dominated the administration and political life. Besides demanding a military institution that was numerically and technically strong, they also expressed the desire for autonomy that is the mark of increased professionalization. After the war with Paraguay and the fall of the empire had enlarged the arena for those previously despised soldiers, it was the leaders of the army itself who demanded the reform and modernization of their institution in accordance with the most prestigious models of the moment.

In other countries when the officers expressed such desires, the army was often reformed and modernized as a result of political considerations. The desire of the civilians to depoliticize the military by professionalizing it and separating it from conflicting factions and parties motivated the reorganization of the armed forces. The result most frequently did not correspond to the original intention: placing an autonomous army above the parties helped to provide it with the means to intervene, on its own, in politics. Nevertheless, depoliticization was the intent of the legislator. It was the "civilianist" Piérola in Peru who, after defeating the military, felt obliged to reconstitute a technically oriented and professional national army

that was concerned with its military duties far from the political scene. In Colombia, after the War of a Thousand Days (1899–1902), the government of Rafael Reyes tried to create a regular army that in theory was free of party loyalties. The governments that followed, all of them conservative, introduced compulsory military service, created or reestablished military schools, and brought in foreign missions in order to end partyrelated armies and give the state an apolitical defensive institution. In Bolivia, the "domination of tin" and the establishment of a national army went side by side. Beginning in 1904, the country created the defensive arm of the state in order to guarantee order and stability in the new and prosperous mining enterprise.

Most of the time the transformation of the army was accompanied by the establishment of compulsory military service. In that period countries like Uruguay, which modernized its army but retained "voluntary" recruitment, were rare. In the Uruguayan case several factors were involved: the pacifism of the Colorado party but especially the refusal of the Blanco party to allow conscription of the youth from the Blanco-controlled countryside into an army that was believed to be loyal to an opposing party. In Argentina, on the other hand, compulsory military service operated to justify the great reforms of 1901. The establishment of conscription and the increased professionalization of the officer corps prescribed in the reform law were part of a vast effort to modernize Argentine society which would justify the predominance and legitimacy of the ruling group. In a country with massive numbers of immigrants conscription was also an antidote to cosmopolitanism. The army was to be the melting pot, the institution that would "Argentinize" the foreigner and produce Argentinians. This was a serious and delicate responsibility that involved a broad program and did not argue for the irreversible depoliticization of the military institution.

3—
Modernization by the Army

At the beginning of the century the national armies of the majority of South American countries experienced a qualitative leap. As a result of many factors, the "old army" gave way to a "new army." The overall military modernization began with the "professionalization" of the officer corps. This was an ambiguous formula that was to be cited often by the civilians when they were confronted by armies in revolt in violation of the constitutions that described them as "professional, apolitical, and non-deliberating." In Europe in 1973, because we had heard it said so often by the leaders of Popular Unity, we believed that the Chilean army was a professionalized and not a draft army. Alas, it was just the opposite. However, that misunderstanding is symptomatic of the change that involved making officers true professionals at arms with the understanding that they would then be concerned only with their profession. In a word, a reform that was aimed at organizing "the nation at arms" resulted in making military life a permanent full-time paid profession that required study, lengthy physical and intellectual preparation, and was subject to strictly codified bureaucratic rules.

That profound and dramatic transformation in relation to what preceded it could have appeared trivial to someone analyzing military power without considering the history and structure of the army. But if you wish to explain how in order to answer the question of why, it is difficult to overlook the specific characteristics of the modern army. Nor can one forget national differences. The permanent—even overwhelming—political role of the ar-

mies of the continent, as well as the praetorianism that appears to make them less concerned with things military, may lead us to underestimate their military nature. From there it is only a step to considering them simply as political forces in competition for power like the others. To reach that conclusion is certainly to be ignorant, not only about the "military parties" but about the functioning of the Latin American political systems for the last half century.

Therefore, we are going to examine the organization and composition of those armies that have such importance for the future of the continent. We will also look at how the officers become politicized, since the paradox of modernization, that—avowedly or not, was aimed at removing the military from politics—was that it marked the end of civilian hegemony in nearly every country in the region. Measures that were aimed at defending and stabilizing political life and regulating the harmonious functioning of the state produced, on the contrary, institutional ruptures and military usurpation. The armies, in emancipating themselves from civil society and the ruling class, became repoliticized on a different basis according to their own organizational logic.

Military Organization and "Professionalization"

Armies are all organized along the same lines. The degree of militarization of defense institutions varies, but the similarity in behavior and attitudes of military organizations that are separated in time and space is surprising. It is not necessary to postulate a common set of essential characteristics of the military, but rather to recognize that armies are institutions that act in accordance with their own manifest functions.

As complex organizations of a particular type, military forces always have as their objective, if not their reason for existence, the legitimate exercise of violence. From that defining mission follows a system of organization and norms. These values are linked on the one hand to the operation and on the other, to the functions of the institution—that is, to the goals

that it has espoused. The institution's organizational values follow from the pyramidal structure and centralized command required for decision making in combat. Its operational values provide an answer to questions regarding the purpose and need for combat. "Why are we fighting?" "Why are they our enemy?" Those two sets of values overlap, but one can weigh more than the other in specific circumstances and armies can be divided in accordance with the relative importance of each complex of norms.

In addition, armies differ from other institutions in that they are "total" organizations, or nearly so. Even if military men are generally drawn from the civilian population, the specialty of arms is not a profession like the others. The distinction between civilians and the military involves something far more significant than the separation and sense of unity produced by wearing a uniform. Armies are coercive organizations in which authority is based on a constraint that is both physical and symbolic. They are bureaucracies to which the formalized mechanisms of checks and balances and limitations on the central authority do not apply. In short, the autocratic concentration of command is in conformity with the exigencies of combat, and it is this rationale that requires commissioned and noncommissioned officers to ask the permission of their colonel to take a wife. The self-sufficiency of the armies, their independence of society—demonstrated by the existence of "military" chaplains, doctors, musicians, barbers, and veterinarians—works in the same direction. Indeed, that special quality, the voluntary isolation that is supposed to anticipate the autonomy of armies on campaign, also has another function that is symbolic in character—that is, to produce an acceptance through rituals and myths, images and identification procedures, of the monopoly of violence and the need for a defensive apparatus.

Those organizational values may appear to be universal. The norms that we have called operational, that is, the military ethic or "symbolic system,"^[1] however, are affected by the sociopolitical environment. More precisely, they are related to the type of recruitment, armament, and strategy of a given period and civilization. Thus a mass army recruited from rural groups with a low level of culture produces the glorification of heroism,

honor, and self-sacrifice that promote obedience and discipline on the part of the foot soldiers. These were the dominant values among the Western armies when the Latin American states emulated them. The importance of the formation of character and "military drill" that was an expression of the deep division between the troops (the men) and the commanders (the leaders) resulted from the same requirement.

This was the model that the Latin American countries were to attempt to adopt—or, as their critics would say, to ape. Most of this activity took place in the absence of any imminent likelihood of armed conflict, and this contributed to an increase of institutional rigidity and to the development of a heroic rhetoric justifying these particular bureaucracies. The establishment of organizations of this kind required a high level of self-sufficiency, intense socialization of its members, and the institutionalization of the military career through continuing technical formation in a network of special schools. All these elements guaranteed a normative isolation, which, as we shall see, closed the army to society, only to open to it a more direct access to power.

We have seen in the preceding chapter how modernization responded to different needs in each country. But it is clear that in all cases—even when, as in Brazil, the dominant groups needed a great deal of persuasion—the formation of modern armies developed in response to Latin America's new role in the world economy. The modern armies were state forces that guaranteed internal order and the uninterrupted exploitation of the mineral and agricultural riches desired by Europe. As modern institutions with a technical level that was advanced by international—that is, European—standards, they projected an image abroad of seriousness and competence that reassured investors. In a way they were the complement "for foreign consumption" of the Westminster-style parliamentarianism that seemed to delight the Latin American elites at the turn of the century.

It is not true, however, that these armies were created by the metropolitan economic powers in order to control the sources of their primary products. The most important economic power and the primary investor in the subcontinent at the time

of that change. Great Britain, was not a military model and only incidentally sold armaments. France, on the other hand, which shared with Germany a quasi-monopoly of the export of military technology, had only a modest place, apart from the sale of arms, in the foreign trade of the Latin American countries. Since the European countries were in constant rivalry, it is also difficult to believe in an agreement or division of labor that would be of primary benefit to Great Britain. In fact, we are discussing a process that was dependent, it is true, but was nevertheless directed from within Latin America in response to internal necessities. The modern army was both a symbol of progress and an instrument of centralization which promoted the building of the state. As national armies, the military establishments required a unified ruling class for their improvement and expansion. Thus the later that unification took place, the more the process of professionalization was delayed—sometimes to the benefit of an unstable civilian power, and sometimes to give way to the de facto power of a dictator.

Since the prestige of a well-organized and well-trained army reflected favorably on the state itself, it is not surprising that externally oriented nations should call upon instructors from the two most prestigious armies in the world between 1880 and 1920—the armies of France and Germany. These two enemy countries, victors and vanquished in two successive wars, made their services available to any nation that wished to reorganize its defensive apparatus. At stake were both diplomatic and commercial influence, and also the expansion of the armaments industry. Their transatlantic rivalry was a form of "warfare" pursued by indirect means, and in that context of bitter military-commercial rivalry any actions were justified. Secret agents inspired campaigns in the local press and gathered intelligence about the "enemy."^[2] In Brazil the Germans did not hesitate to discredit French war materiel while the French denounced the racism of the German officer as being out of place in a nation of mestizos.^[3] The struggle for influence and military preponderance put the Latin American states in a position of privilege and choice that they utilized in accordance with their own geostrategic characteristics. Nevertheless, we should note that externally oriented modernization through the purchase of

technology and armament produces a narrow dependence. Those armies that were the symbols of independence and the emblems of sovereignty thus only seemed to be "Europeanstyle" armies. Without heavy industry of their own, they secured everything from Krupp or Schneider. Thus they were involved by necessity in the diplomatic game and participated in political decisions relating to foreign trade. This is why the military in the richest countries of the continent often took the lead in industrial expansion in order to diminish the "critical dependence" that might undermine the operational capacities of these imitative armed forces.

An Externalized Modernization

The three adversaries in the War of the Pacific—Chile, which was the winner, and Peru and Bolivia, which lost—were, if not the first states to turn to Europe in order to reorganize their armies, undoubtedly those that emulated the Continent most completely. In Chile, which learned from the Germans, Prussianization left traces that are still visible today. While the officers have stopped wearing the Prussian uniforms and the mustaches and monocles of the Kaiser period, the cadets in the military college still wear the pointed helmet and parade with the goose step. In 1885 the Chilean government decided to hire a German mission to professionalize its army. The victory in the war had revealed weakness in the national military structure and the dangers were far from over. Chile felt surrounded by enemies. Peruvian and Bolivian irredentism disturbed Santiago. Peru had not yet accepted the loss of the province of Tarapacá and the occupation of the ports of Tacna and Arica. Landlocked Bolivia kept an eye fixed on its lost maritime outlet, the port of Antofagasta on the Pacific, while Chile's large Argentine neighbor appeared hostile to the narrow nation confined behind a Cordillera lacking clear boundaries. Colonel Körner, chief of the mission from 1886 until 1910, was to transform an army of veterans of the War of the Pacific into a modern force with a high-level Prussianized officer corps that enjoyed great prestige throughout the conti-

nent. While the Libertador O'Higgins had created the first military school in Latin America immediately after independence (1817), Colonel Körner founded a Colegio Militar in 1886 modeled on the Kriegsakademie with a three-year program of study. The best students were sent to German regiments and even to the imperial guard. More than thirty German officers were working in Chile by the beginning of this century. In 1906 a program of reform of the army's organization and internal regulations was completed that transformed the Chilean military into a veritable reflection of the German army. Colonel Körner, now a general, was a member of the Chilean army, having been named chief of the general staff in 1891. During the confrontation between the nationalist president Balmaceda and the parliamentary oligarchy, Körner and his followers supported the adversaries of the president while the army as a whole remained loyal to him. This has been cited as proof of Körner's antinationalist orientation and predisposition to European interests. It is undeniable that the German mission did much for German industry and for Krupp in particular. Under the influence of Körner the government contracted a large loan in 1898 in order to buy arms; in the course of the arms race that then ensued in the Southern Cone, the Chilean government did not hesitate to pledge the customs revenues of the country to its creditors,^[4]

Almost at the same time, no doubt in response to the Chilean challenge, Peru hired a French military mission. The first team under the command of Captain Paul Clément arrived in Lima in 1896. The French organized and instructed the Peruvians until 1940, with an interruption between 1914 and 1918. In contrast to the Germans in Chile, the French did not become involved in the political life of Peru, but their influence was no less, important. The French army, which at the time emphasized defense and fortifications, was of particular interest to the Peruvians because of desired assistance in the area of military engineering. In reports and instructions that were influenced by their colonial experience, the French gave special emphasis to transportation and communication, the military presence in the population, and their knowledge of the country. Some have argued that French influence was one of the causes of the

"populist" and social orientation of the Peruvian officers, an attitude that was demonstrated in the 1960s.^[5] A direct relationship cannot be proven, but the French influence produced a very different result from that of the Prussian officers in the hostile neighboring republic.

Bolivia, reacting later to the shock of the war, was more eclectic in its choice. A private French military mission reorganized the programs of the Military School and the War College in 1905. Beginning in 1910, however, La Paz imitated Santiago and hired German instructors. The director of the mission, Colonel Hans Kundt, was soon named head of the general staff. With a team of a dozen commissioned and noncommissioned officers from Germany, he initiated a German system of instruction of officers and enlisted men and introduced the regulations of the German army. His initial contract was extended until 1914. In 1921 Kundt, now a general, returned to Bolivia and became a naturalized citizen; subsequently he became deeply involved in the country's political life as one of the principal supporters of the Republican party. That old-style "politicization" of a military notable seems to have interfered with the strengthening of the war machine. When Bolivia faced Paraguay in the Chaco affair (1932–35), Kundt's army was beaten by the Paraguayans just as the old army had been beaten by the Chileans on the Pacific. That defeat and the difficult mixture of young academically trained officers with old-style generals, of veterans with politicians, had a long-term impact on the Bolivian military.

In cosmopolitan Argentina, which had attempted very early to professionalize its officer corps, eclecticism at the beginning dominated the choice of foreign connections. The Military College, which was responsible for the formation of officers and was created by Sarmiento in 1869, had as its first directors an Austro-Hungarian colonel and a French cavalry commander. The French army was the model for the Argentine army until 1904, but the armament of the old army was German Krupp cannons and Mauser rifles after 1884. In 1900 the prestige of the Imperial General Staff carried the day, and the Superior War School was created under German patronage. The teaching staff was made up of German officers, and the school,

which certified members of the General Staff, remained until the eve of the Second World War a bastion of the German military tradition. For the Argentine admirers of the German military machine who continued after 1914–18 to analyze the 1870 war from the German side, it was as if Germany had not lost World War I.

The process of Germanization was completed after 1904 when Argentine officers were sent en masse for training in the regiments of the (German) Imperial Army. A Brazilian military attaché claimed in 1921 that "half the Argentine officers have gone through German schools or the German army."^[6] The influence of the Offizier Korps penetrated Argentine military society profoundly. Half of the twelve books published between 1918 and 1930 by the Officers' Library series of official military texts were translated from German. Admiration for the German model was unbounded. Thus, few of the Argentine officers thought in 1914 that the most formidable war machine that had ever existed could be beaten. It is reported that General José Uriburu, who in 1930 would become the first military president of modern Argentina and had kept since his training in the Kaiser's guard the evocative nickname of "von Pepe," pointed to the map during the war and announced to the Military Club that the victory of the imperial armies was inevitable. This is why the few isolated voices that denounced the danger inherent in a mechanical imitation of the German model were justifiably disturbed.^[7]

In Brazil it was the officers who tried to strengthen the national army. Some civilians did not share the fears of the regional oligarchies that a strong army could be the instrument of the central government. The poor performance of the army in the face of the peasant revolt of Canudos, and the distrust of Argentina, Brazil's traditional rival in the subcontinent, argued for a reorganization and an effort to modernize the equipment of the military. In order to accomplish this it was necessary to call upon Europe. The Germans and French could not have asked for anything better: from the end of the century the two countries competed to furnish cannons to Brazil. A French mission was hired by the state of São Paulo in 1906 to reorganize and train the Public Force so that it became a formidable local

army. Nevertheless, thanks to clever propaganda, the Germans generally dominated. From 1905 to 1912 thirty Brazilian officers were sent to the German army for instruction, and in 1908 Marshal Hermes da Fonseca, the minister of war and the most prestigious and influential Brazilian general, was the guest of the imperial government. He participated in the grand maneuvers and agreed to open negotiations concerning the establishment of a German military mission. However, in 1910 the same marshal visited France and buried the German proposal, but without agreeing to a French mission. The competition between the two nations was for high stakes: the orders for the war industry included the rearming of the artillery, a program of coastal defense, and the creation of an air force.

Those who had been trained in the German army formed a "home mission" that instructed the cadets in the military school according to the German model. The oldest officers, whose promotion had owed more to political patronage than to their education or military capacity, were hostile to all foreign missions. They feared innovation for career reasons and did not always feel capable of adapting themselves to a European model. Nevertheless, the victory of arms was decisive between France and Germany, and in 1919 a French mission was hired. Directed by General Maurice Gustave Gamelin, it was to transform the Brazilian army from top to bottom, and to last until 1939.

Arms purchases from France allowed Brazil to close the enormous distance between the Brazilian military and the forces of industrial countries. However, it was in the domain of organization, education, and careers that the French influence was particularly marked. The distribution of units throughout the country in the manner of a police force was followed by the formation of large units that could be easily maneuvered and coordinated by a general staff along the lines of a French plan. The officers, who up to that time had received a very theoretical education, now were exposed to a solid military curriculum under the guidance of French instructors at all levels, as well as in the military school beginning in 1924. A series of practical schools and auxiliary services was created. As a result of the French updating, the old army, modernized French-style, underwent a veritable revolution; this was especially marked in

the area of advancement, which from that time was strictly codified by law and removed from local political influence. Merit and professional accomplishment governed all careers.

The French impact was profound and lasting. In 1937 every member of the infantry High Command had been educated by the French as were all the successive ministers of war from 1934 until 1960. General Goes Monteiro, who dominated the military scene from 1930 to 1946, had ranked first in the advanced course organized in Rio de Janeiro by the mission in 1921. The Brazilian disciples of the French army did not lack opportunities to recall the debt that they felt toward their instructors and their admiration for the prestigious officers who commanded the mission. Thus, the image of General Gamelin is very different in Brazil from his image in France, where he is known as chief of the general staff that directed the "debacle." In 1926 a Brazilian military journal stated, "He was the founder of our military doctrine. He established its principles in our basic regulations and he familiarized us with genuine knowledge of it through the superb practical and theoretical lessons that he taught us on maneuvers and in the lecture halls."^[8] Again in 1940 General Gaspar Dutra, the minister of war, declared in a speech given during the Third Region maneuvers in the presence of President Vargas, "I remember the great maneuvers of 1922. They were headed by the exceptional figure of General Gamelin, a universally admired name today that we always mention with nostalgia and veneration."^[9]

The Gallicism of these admirers of the army of Foch and Petain impressed contemporaries. Parallel to the Argentine "von Pepe" and just as real is the caricature of a Francophile general that appears in a scene in one of the novels of Jorge Amado. A self-important old fogey and a candidate for the Brazilian Academy, he had been a distinguished student of the professors in the French mission, and invincible in military maneuvers. The general, Waldomiro Moreira, nicknamed "Maginot line" by his enemies, wrote in the press that during the Second World War Hitler's Panzer Divisionen "had no respect for the established rules of military science, and every evening the Panzer Divisionen contradicted his predictions of each morning."^[10]

If we leave aside—to return to them in a future chapter—

the neocolonial armies created by the United States, we find the same efforts to learn from Europe in nearly every country under different conditions and with different parameters depending on the level of development, the geopolitical situation, and the degree to which a national state had been established. Obviously not all countries hired expensive military missions. We should mention in this context the curious phenomenon of "second-hand" Prussianization carried out by the Chilean army in several countries of the continent. In Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, and Venezuela, Chilean military missions were called upon to reorganize and to "Europeanize" the national army. In Colombia a team of Chilean officers created the first military school worthy of the name in 1907. The same thing happened in Venezuela, but at the same time officer candidates went for study to Peru, and in 1920 a French mission established the air force and instructed the infantry.

The foreign presence was not without its problems for the host armies. First of all, the European missions aroused genuine resistance from officers who favored a different military influence—the pro-Germans in Brazil, for example. Also, the old officers of the earlier army were not happy about returning to school or having subordinates more knowledgeable than they were, and especially about allowing foreigners to come into direct contact with the internal mechanisms that guaranteed their power in the institution. The "missionaries," on the other hand, wanted to transform and regulate everything, indeed to exercise direct command so as to implement their reforms more effectively. There is no other way to explain the complete integration of the German missions in Chile and Bolivia. General Gamelin complained about the head of the infantry general staff that he "does not support our tutelage [sic] " and "dreams of a French military mission that is completely subordinated."^[11] The responsibilities of a foreign mission were not limited to the transfer of technology and expert consultation; other functions, such as defense, the preparations and the development of military doctrine, related to the area of politics. Also, there were frequent conflicts and the admiration for the mentor army was not without a certain impatience on the part of its disciples. This is one of the paradoxes of externally oriented

modernization that was perhaps too quickly forgotten when the armies of the continent changed masters.

Recruitment and Formation of Officers

The reform of the system of recruitment of officers is central to the modernization of the military. In order to accomplish this it is necessary to produce more educated officers and to raise the professional and technical level in all the grades. In most cases this required a single source of recruitment. Graduation from military school became obligatory in order to obtain an officer's commission. The ideal desired by all the armies, even if they did not always achieve it, was formation according to a single pattern aimed at increasing the homogeneity and esprit de corps of the officers. It was precisely this desired homogeneity that the Argentine military reformers admired in the Offizier Korps. "Their officers have one and the same origin, they belong to the same social class, and to be admitted must pass the same tests. Today they constitute a veritable family,"^[12] said an Argentine general about the German officers, despite the fact that he was defending the "old army." But alternative sources of recruitment were not eliminated everywhere. A Brazilian officer, in a report to his minister concerning the Peruvian army in 1922, deplored the fact that by a law passed in 1901 a third of the officer positions in Peru were reserved for promoted noncommissioned officers because of the insufficient number of candidates for the military school. "This is a source," he commented, "of a lack of homogeneity that gives rise to a certain [internal] rivalry."^[13]

The early methods of recruitment of officers were terminated or abolished more or less slowly. In Guatemala up until 1944 it was not uncommon to find officers who had risen from the ranks rather than graduating from the Polytechnic School that was established in 1873. The continued presence of field-officers was a source of internal division within the institution.^[14] Similarly, the barrier between commissioned and noncommissioned officers was more or less unbridgeable depending on the country. It was permeable in Bolivia, but totally airtight in Argentina. In most cases after a transition period noncommissioned

officers either could not receive a lieutenant's commission or they were required to take the entrance examination for the military academy, as in Peru. In Brazil, that possibility was ended in the 1930s, producing frustration among the sergeants. The officers, for their part, acquired a feeling of belonging to an elite or a superior caste. In these highly bureaucratized peacetime armies internal social stratification was therefore very pronounced and the myth that every soldier carried in his knapsack a marshal's baton was no longer applicable.

These reforms, however rigorous their application, had a further consequence. Besides the new cohesion of the officer corps due to a common military education, the recruitment process became in principle free of direct political pressure. The requirement of a unique type of education implied a system of selection based on standards that in theory were objective and universal. Thus, the cadets were chosen by their peers in accordance with an ideal image of an officer and the needs of the institution. The control by civilian "patrons," recruitment on the basis of support by "distinguished soldiers," or "promoted officers" became a thing of the past. The reform in recruitment, by increasing the independence of the military as a corporate group, established the basis of military power.

The force of the specific socialization and resocialization carried out by the institution not only increased esprit de corps among the officers but also enhanced their sense of belonging to the military branch of the state. This influence was all the more complete because the training process was carried out with young recruits in relative isolation and lasted for a considerable period. In Guatemala, for example, future officers enter the Polytechnic School at the age of fourteen and remain for five years.^[15] In Argentina the cadets join at between fourteen and eighteen years of age. In most countries they are around sixteen or seventeen, whether or not a secondary school diploma is required. In these conditions a strong internalization of the proposed values and models takes place that assures a specialized socialization and a deeply rooted corporate spirit.

Who can become an officer and who in fact becomes one? The educational entry requirements for the military school seem to be the only limitation on an apparently open system of

recruitment. If the completion of secondary school is required, we can assume that the cadet's family has a relatively high income. And in fact in countries in which nearly a majority is illiterate (Guatemala, Peru, Bolivia, etc.), the simple fact of access to secondary school is already strongly discriminatory. The lower classes are very poorly represented in those military schools, especially in the societies where those classes are the most impoverished. It is true that many officers choose a military career for economic reasons, since military studies are short and generally free. This does not mean, however, that officers are therefore recruited among the poorer classes, or that the army provides a clear means of social mobility in all countries. The closed selection system permits the application of social or even of ethnic requirements that are not democratic. Thus the height requirement (5 feet, 4 or 6 inches) is met by only 16 percent of the enlisted men in Peru, and practically eliminates the children of Indians in all the Andean countries. In Bolivia the seemingly vague and harmless requirement of belonging to a "distinguished family" implies a strict social selectivity. ^[16] Similarly, the investigation carried out in Argentina as to moral character of the family of the candidate is not limited to the elimination of illegitimate children or those whose families are not well thought of in their neighborhood. In addition, candidates are rejected as a result of medical examinations from which there is no appeal where appearance and skin color are more significant than size or chest capacity. Thus the military elite preserves its image. Not all regimes are as frank as the Estado Novo (of Brazil) which decided officially in 1942 to deny military school access to non-Catholics (especially Jews) and blacks, and also to the children of immigrants, political opponents, and divorcees or concubines.^[17]

Much has been written about the social origins of the officers. Observers and publicists have tended to put too much emphasis upon it, even trying to explain the political attitudes of the armies solely through that much-misunderstood variable. The twofold relationship of the military to society and to the state, as well as the importance of specific patterns of socialization, should permit us to put this aspect of military society in proper perspective. As a result of the authoritarian training that

he has received and of the specific characteristics of the institution that has formed him, the officer is determined less by his family origins than by his relation to the army. This does not mean that we should neglect family origins. These affect the relation of the officer to civilian society in the sense that since he lives in symbiosis with the institution that he has chosen as the organizing principle of his existence, his family (including in-laws) constitutes his main, and sometimes his only, source of contact with the civilian world.

The social and professional characteristics of the officers' parents are not the only significant elements especially in societies that are "dualistic" and contain very pronounced regional differences. Social and sometimes political coloration can result from geographical and ecological divisions. The opposition between the urban and rural areas has often been emphasized—and sometimes overemphasized. Thus, one author, noting the largely urban origin of a multinational sample of Latin American officers that included some who came from less urbanized countries (Honduras, Nicaragua) concluded that recruitment in the "modern" sector of society implies "reformist" or progressive attitudes on the part of the armed forces. There is no proof that the urban environment produces liberal or reformist behavior, even if the equation of rural and conservative is, with some reservations, more accurate.^[18] Nevertheless, it is important in understanding the Peruvian army to know that fewer and fewer officers come from Lima and the dynamic cities of the coast, and increasing numbers of officers in the course of this century have come from small urban centers in the interior and even from the depopulated Indian sierra.^[19] Between 1955 and 1965, among the infantry generals who were officer candidates in the 1930s, only 18 percent came from Lima and 56 percent came from the sierra or the Amazonian selva, while, as Luigi Einaudi notes, 94 percent of the most important leaders of Peruvian society were born in Lima or on the coast.^[20] In 1968, two-thirds of the members of the governing junta were of provincial origin.

In Brazil, where the garrisons are unequally distributed and concentrated mainly on the southern frontier and in the coastal cities, it is not surprising that there are many officers

who come from Rio Grande do Sul, which is next to Uruguay, while São Paulo, the economic capital, provides very few military men. In 1930, eight of the thirty divisional generals were gauchos (that is, they were born in Rio Grande do Sul) and none was a paulista .^[21] The poor and economically depressed states also provide a strong contingent of officers. A military witness noted that at the beginning of the century the cadets at the Realengo Military School (Rio) were organized by place of birth and that the largest groups were those from Sergipe and Alagoas, two of the weakest and poorest states in the country.^[22] A French diplomat who was chief of protocol at the Quai d'Orsay noted on the occasion of a reception in 1945 in honor of the general staff of the Brazilian expeditionary force that fought alongside the Americans in Italy, headed by the future president Castello Branco:

I enjoyed meeting those fine officers, discreet in their bearing, and ferret-like in their appearance with their skulls flattened in the back (cabeça chata ) which was evidence of some mixture of Indian blood. Almost all of them came from the states of the North (Piaui, Ceara, Pernambuco); they are the traditional efficient and able leaders of the Brazilian army. As former students of General Gamelin and Hutzinger in our educational mission, they have just fought with intelligence and modesty in Italy.^[23]

Whatever the value of his anthropological theory, the statistical observation is less debatable. Politically, the fact that the officers come largely from the smallest and poorest states (Alagoas, Sergipe, Ceara, Pemambuco, Piaui) or from a more prosperous state that is far from the axis of power represented by the alliance of São Paulo and Minas Gerais is of primary importance.

Corresponding to the preponderance of these two geographical areas in recruitment are two different social backgrounds. In the south, which is an active area of cattle breeding and agricultural development with a considerable Italian population, many children of immigrants are attracted by the prestige of the armed forces and enter the military school in Porto Alegre; thus, the military completes the process of assimilation in the country that has received them. In the northeast, which was the economic center of gravity when sugar was king, it is

the families of the ruined rural aristocracy that, in order not to lose standing, send their sons to the army. The menino de engenho, the grandson or great-grandson of the sugar baron, enters the military school when the family cannot pay for his education, since a broad range of acceptable professions is not available. Thus two opposite paths lead to the Brazilian officer corps.

In Argentina, as we have demonstrated elsewhere, the geographic origin that seems to have predominated since the great transformation at the beginning of the century is from the urban and economically modernized areas. The upper-level Argentine officers, for example, rarely come from the families of the rural squires of the old colonial provinces of the north. In that country the percentage of children of immigrants who reach the highest military ranks is very high. A desire to establish one's roots in the national society by choosing a patriotic profession also seems to have played a role here, since social mobility could have been achieved in many other more reliable careers in the economically expanding areas. Thus, the officer corps is an open group and not a hereditary caste that is reserved for the old families of "military" or political background. Let us now see to whom that profession is open.

The lack of documentation, as well as the social heterogeneity in nearly all the armies of the continent, has resulted in the commonplace that a majority of the officers in Latin America come from the middle classes. This is both true and of dubious utility. A universally applicable residual category, the concept of middle class(es) is too vague to aid our understanding. A few undoubtedly insufficient facts will provide better guidance.

In general, few representatives of the lower classes are members of the officer corps, for reasons that we have discussed earlier in this chapter; however, the lower classes are not absent. The social position that the officers adopt officially in society varies depending on their political role and the social prestige of the army, but most of the time they identify with the upper strata. The idea that hereditary social authority predisposes one to exercise command is generally well received, even though the dominant national groups refuse to send their offspring to the barracks. Nevertheless, the general staffs try to make the social

profile of the future officers coincide with their social aspirations. This does not mean that they always succeed in doing so. In Argentina before 1945 only one prestigious colonel came from a working-class background—a friend of Peron who was the son of a railroad worker. A study of Argentine cadets at the end of the 1960s showed that 2.4 percent were the children of industrial workers, but if those who came from categories of the lower middle class (technicians, petty civil servants, tradesmen) were included, the working class amounted to 25 percent of the enrollment in that same period.^[24] These figures demonstrate an undeniable democratization of access to the officer ranks.

In Brazil industrial workers and artisans provided 3.8 percent of the enrollment in the military academy in 1941–43,^[25] and 15 percent in 1962–66. For Chile the only existing investigation based on a very small sample of thirty-seven retired generals indicates the figure of 9 percent for the children of employees.^[26] We know that in Peru, where the recruitment has always been more open than in other South American countries, the officers have been recruited less and less from the quasi-white classes at the top of the social pyramid, and more and more "in the lower and darker-skinned classes."^[27] At the end of the sixties, it was noted that among those who initiated the revolutionary-military movement of 1968 were officers of clearly lower-class background: the son of a schoolteacher (Leonidas Rodriguez), sons of peasants (Hoyos and Gallegos), and the son of a telegraph operator (Fernandez Maldonado).^[28] Velasco Alvarado, who was obviously mixed in his racial background, came from modest origins in the distant northern city of Piura.

The traditional upper classes do not always leave the military career to the common people. Even in Peru they were present in the "revolutionary" junta of 1968, two of whose fifteen members came from prominent families (including the grandson of a former president who became president himself in 1975, Morales Bermudez).^[29] In Brazil the traditional upper classes (the large landholders, the members of the liberal professions, upper-level civil servants) provided 20 percent of the enrollment in the military school between 1941 and 1943, and still constituted 6 percent in 1962–66.^[30] The Chilean sample produces the

figure of 66 percent who were children of professionals, businessmen, or farmers, but these categories are very vague.

In Argentina well-known names abound in the upper ranks, and they are not absent in the graduating classes of the military college. Alongside the children of the immigrants, the local and national aristocracies are well represented in the upper ranks in the recent period. In fact, composition of the recruits has changed depending on the political role of the military at various times. After 1930 the "aristocratic reaction" pushed the children of the oligarchy toward the military college. At the end of the 1950s, on the other hand, Perón tried to democratize access to the military schools, with mixed results.

Internal recruitment and an increase in the number of the sons of military men are worldwide phenomena that are also evident in Latin America. Family values facilitate the choice of a profession that appears to contradict the evolution of society as a whole. For that reason, the increased difficulty of recruiting civilians, and even at times the disaffection of the sons of the officers with the military career, leads to the opening of the officer corps to the sons of noncommissioned officers for whom it constitutes an avenue of social mobility. The percentage of sons of military men among the students in the military schools was nearly 42 percent in 1967–68 in Argentina, and 35 percent in Brazil during the same period.^[31] Families in which one can demonstrate a military tradition for three or four generations can be found in these countries as well as in Peru and Chile. Internal recruitment could produce a homogeneous military society, the formation of a military caste, if access to the military profession did not remain open. Such a recruitment process at least results in accentuating the militarization of military life, and an insularity that is accepted, encouraged, and socially approved.

The unwritten code of the Chilean army disapproves of relations with civilians. The observation, "associates with civilian elements," written in the evaluation file of a young Argentine officer, was at the least a bad omen for his career. In the sample of Chilean officers already cited, seventeen out of thirty-seven had no civilian friends during their last year of active duty and seven of them had only one.^[32] The emphasis on grades in exami-

nations, practical training, and advanced courses—central to promotion in the absence of war—was modified at the time of the reforms at the beginning of the century in the direction of a military curriculum and a disdain for civilian subjects. Education that had earlier been very general and encyclopedic—as in Brazil—now became specialized, and civilian areas of specialization were not well regarded. In Argentina it was not until the 1950s that a university diploma would help an officer to be promoted rather than be held against him. Today, however, in the most militarized countries courses include such nonmilitary subjects as political economy and public administration—subjects that are related, it is true, to the actual responsibilities of an important sector of the officers.

In summary, except for the countries in which the prestige of the military is very low for historical reasons that we will discuss later (Mexico, Bolivia), the officers come essentially from the intermediate sectors that are comfortably off, the upwardly mobile lower-middle class, and the declining upper classes; however, the upper and lower classes are not absent—although those from the upper classes find it easier to be promoted to the higher ranks than do the members of the lower classes. Some specific examples will suffice to illustrate these social backgrounds.

First, we will consider two active Brazilian officers who opposed each other—General Goes Monteiro, the Minister of War and Grand Constable of the Vargas regime (1930–45), and Lieutenant Luis Carlos Prestes, who left the army to become general secretary of the Communist party. The first was born in the state of Alagoas, the son of a doctor who died young, leaving nine children who belonged, to use his own description, to the "decaying Northeastern rural plutocracy." He was born "in a period of the increasing impoverishment of his family."^[33] He entered the military school of Realengo in 1903 and subsequently that of Porto Alegre without a vocation to military life; but this did not prevent him from having a brilliant career as an officer involved in politics. Prestes, the future "knight of hope" and the leader of the Long March across Brazil in 1924 that marked the military revolt against the power of the established

order, came from the bourgeoisie of Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul.^[34] His paternal grandfather was a judge; his maternal grandfather was a rich merchant who had lost his fortune before his grandson was born. The father of Luis Carlos Prestes who was bom in 1908 was an officer of the infantry. He died in 1908, leaving his widow with five children and a meager captain's pension. Luis Carlos, as the son of an officer, received a scholarship to attend the military preparatory school of Rio de Janeiro where his mother took up residence in a working-class area. She made her living by giving courses in music and French, and sometimes, it was said, doing sewing in her home. This is the basis of the legend of a Prestes arisen from the people, the son of a seamstress.

The biography of Roberto Viaux, the author of a coup in Chile who had his hour of glory at the end of the 1960s is rather significant. He was born in 1917 in Talca, the son of an infantry commander, and studied at a German preparatory school in Santiago that prepared him to enter the military school after his fourth year. He graduated in artillery, and married the daughter of a colonel—something not unusual in Chile—who was also well known for his antidemocratic ideas.^[35] Last but not least, we should recall the mysterious family background of Perón, that, despite his unusual career, seems typical of the family background of Argentine cadets. Juan Domingo Perón belonged to a "good" family from the province of Buenos Aires. His grandfather, Tomás, was a doctor and well-known conservative politician. His father, who did not attend the university as his family wished, was unsuccessful in agriculture, and in his marriage. His son preferred to talk of his grandfather, rather than his father and mother,^[36] which led to the rumor that he came from very humble origins (the son of a steward and a halfcaste servant). After some years spent with his family in distant Patagonia (Chubut), with the help of his paternal grandfather he enrolled in a distinguished private secondary school in the residential suburbs of Buenos Aires. Thus he came from a good family in decline—one of the classic methods of access to the Argentine middle class and perhaps to military vocations in Argentina and elsewhere.

The Establishment of Obligatory Military Service

Paradoxically, in these supposedly "professionalized" armies, the enlisted men were civilians. While in the old army the soldiers were professional military men and the officers were very often amateurs, in the new army the opposite was the case: permanent professional officers and transitory and civilian enlisted men. The military were those who most often called for the establishment of universal service. The ideal of "a nation in arms" was always under the surface in the reforms of the military structures at the beginning of the century. A universal defense obligation—at least in theory—was therefore a basic part of the reforms initiated at that time. For the officers and the heads of the general staffs who were aware of the mediocre quality of the human "materiel" secured by enlistment, the way to improve recruitment was to enlarge it, thus permitting an increase in both quality and quantity. With enlisted men drawn from marginal elements, the army remained at the periphery of society and of the nation. The modernizing military demanded that "society be opened to the army," in the words of José Murilho de Carvalho.^[37] However, forming a citizen army is not a simple technical problem. The social and political implications of universal service are evident. An army through which, in principle, all citizens pass then aims at being the school of the nation, the crucible of national sentiment.

The role of military service in civic and moral formation has often been noted. The officers of the new Latin American armies love to speak of it. Very recently a Brazilian general in a high political position observed that it was in the barracks that a good number of Brazilians learned to use a toothbrush! Under a system of conscription, the role and responsibilities of the officer take on a national—and therefore clearly political—role. In heterogeneous societies the army acts to promote national integration and to form the citizenry. It was not by accident that during the discussion of a conscription law in 1901 in Argentina, a maladroit but sincere deputy exclaimed that it would be "a universal suffrage army" at a time when universal suffrage was part of the program of the opposition and ten years before

it was adopted. In the mind of the legislator and thus of the ruling group a conscript army was dearly responsible for molding the mentality of future voters. The citizen-soldier would be miles [soldier] before he became civis [citizen].

Compulsory military service began in Chile in 1900, Peru and Argentina followed in 1901, Ecuador in 1902, Bolivia in 1907, and Brazil only in 1916. The delay in Brazil deserves some attention. The weakness of the central government and the combined opposition of the lower classes and the local oligarchies to the federal army prevented draft lotteries from being applied. An intense campaign organized by the officers and prestigious civilian leaders, as well as a world war, were required in order for compulsory service to be imposed and for the abolition of the National Guard—which offered military service to the privileged few—in 1918.

The civic and military arguments used by the League for National Defense in support of universal service are not without interest. In the writings of Olavio Bilac, a patriotic poet and Brazilian right-wing nationalist who lent all his literary prestige to the propaganda in favor of "a national democratic, free civilian army for defense and national cohesion," an army of "citizen soldiers, . . . that is the people,"^[38] one finds the grandiose flights and sociopolitical reasoning that are still used by the contemporary military. Bilac believed that conscription would produce "the complete triumph of democracy, a leveling of the social classes"; it would constitute "a school that imparts order and discipline . . .the laboratory of individual dignity and patriotism." Military service, according to the poet,

means obligatory civic education, cleanliness, and hygiene, as well as psychological and physical regeneration. The cities are full of idle men, shoeless and in rags, who do not know the alphabet or the bathtub, animals who have only the appearance of human beings. For those dregs of society, the barracks will be their salvation.^[39]

During the same period the promilitary sectors of the Argentine political class spoke in the same way. A civilian professor of the military college declared in a lecture in 1915 that the officers were committed to the "redemption of the uneducated ignorant and

perverse conscript . . .Argentine by birth but barbarian in condition, who constitutes a danger to social stability and a menace to our culture."^[40] Such descriptions demonstrate that the officers felt that they had been given certain special rights in relation to the national community and that the social control involved in military service had political importance in the larger sense.

The introduction of obligatory military service, even with a lottery and many exemptions, led to a rapid numerical increase in all countries. Chile tripled the number of those in the army when the law went into effect between 1900 and 1901.^[41] The Brazilian army went from 12,000 men in 1889 to 43,000 in 1920. Nevertheless, military service was by no means universal and it was only obligatory for those who could not find a way to escape it. The social selectivity of the system was part of the logic of its moral and civic function: the less well-off classes were the ones that needed to be educated and integrated into the nation, not the sons of the rich. The number of exceptions was high in every country: a diploma here, enrollment in a rifle society or gymnastic group there, a pilot's license in another country, were sufficient to allow exemption from a year in the barracks. Students in most countries were enrolled for a few months in the officers' reserve. Exemptions thus were made on the basis of social criteria, often against the will of the officers. The exemptions were abolished in Argentina to a significant degree when the army as an institution was in power. In that country the head of a corps who objected to the social discrimination would exclaim as each new contingent was incorporated, "How curious, only the poor had children this year."^[42] No doubt because of this institutionalized social discrimination and the type of discipline that resulted from it, the level of desertions remained high, despite the fact that budgetary limitations allowed only a small percentage of each cohort affected by the obligation to enter the barracks. For the same reason recruitment of conscripts continued, and in certain countries a type of local recruiting sergeant became institutionalized (as with the comisionados militares in Guatemala).

All of this produced a considerable separation between the enlisted men and the officers that, along with the manifest goals of military service, brought with it political and social conse-

quences, especially in multiethnic societies. A study of the literacy program of the infantry in Guatemala revealed that 62.5 percent of the conscripts in the service in 1960 were illiterate, and that 30.6 percent did not speak Spanish as their mother tongue, while 14 percent of the soldiers did not speak it at all.^[43] The number of those who spoke only an Indian language in the Andean countries led one commentator to say that the Bolivian army resembled a colonial army with its short Indian enlisted men and tall white officers.^[44] The officers retained an undeniable feeling of superiority as a result of their contact with the populace in the enlisted contingents, which tended to incline them in the direction of the ruling classes and of the elements that are hostile to political equality and representative democracy. A survey of cadets at the Military School in Guatemala showed that more than half of them considered Indians to be inferior.^[45] However, we should not believe that the establishment of compulsory conscription of the poor into military service had only one effect on the officer corps. The contact each year with a new contingent of troops also enabled the officers to appreciate the socioeconomic developments in their country, and to discover misery and oppression, giving a professional and corporate aspect to their social concerns. This in turn is related to the ambiguous nature of military behavior and to the often quite noticeable pendulum in the character of their interventions.

To complete this overview of the modern state armies, we should touch upon the condition of the noncommissioned officers, totally subordinate to the officers. In Brazil, for example, their status is precarious and their term of employment is contractual. The slow pace of officer promotions at the beginning of the century and the bottlenecks in the pyramid of grades—and that did not change markedly after the reforms. Finally, we should say something about the navy, that unknown force that intervenes in political life only late in the evolution of the Latin American military. Sailors are removed from military society, more civilian in outlook and more cosmopolitan than the soldiers. Initially they took their models and structure from Great Britain, and later from the United States. However, their significance to the power of the military remains slight except in certain countries, such as Argentina, where they began to participate in the 1950s.

4—
The Rise of the Power of the Military

With their new civic and national responsibilities and the measure of autonomy that they had acquired with reorganization and modernization, the new state armies of the continent were not inclined to play the role of silent partners. Both their functions and their history impelled them to influence public affairs. Henceforth, the military sector of the state bureaucracy believed that it had a threefold responsibility: to centralize state power by ending its geographic dispersion or impotence in the face of Indian resistance; to control the entire territory with garrisons that represented the sovereignty of the nation state; and finally, to integrate the different ethnic, social, and regional elements by giving them a feeling of common membership. The three tasks did not incline the military to neutrality and civic indifference. In addition, the tradition of political involvement by party-based armies and the period of civil war was not long past, and the immediate day-to-day functions of the armies were not limited to the frontiers. The importance of internal defense in nations that were rarely involved in international conflicts made political intervention appear more normal and less a dramatic perversion of roles; instead of suggesting excessive politicization of the institution, political activity by the military seemed to be an extension of the armies' routine activities.

Indeed, the armies of the subcontinent did not have to wait for the Pentagon or the orders of a MacNamara or Kennedy to give special attention to the internal enemy. Rather than the European models of national defense—the protection of frontiers and an orientation toward an external enemy—internal

problems and domestic social and political dangers were the object of the specifically military actions of the Latin American armies. In Brazil, which had not had a war since the conflict with Paraguay in 1870, it was the army that—with some difficulty—crushed the peasant uprisings of the Contestado and of Canudos. The only enemies of the Argentine army were the Indians who were pushed back in the south and pacified in the north down to the 1930s, the metal workers of Buenos Aires in 1919, the seasonal workers of Patagonia in 1920, and the anarchists who had immigrated from Europe. In Chile, the battalions of the Prussia of South America could only apply the lessons of Moltke and Scharnhorst to the 1907 nitrate strike in Iquique and the some three hundred strikes that marked the first stages of the Chilean trade union movement between 1911 and 1920. We could multiply examples. Those armies were not a resource for diplomacy and external power, but rather an essential instrument for the maintenance of internal order and social peace.

It has been asserted that the influence of the European armies had much to do with the political activism of their transatlantic disciples. The French army is supposed to have transmitted to the Brazilian and Peruvian military its aristocratic tradition and its distrust of the representative system.^[1] The Offizier Korps is suspected of having transmitted to the Prussianized armies of Latin America its caste spirit and a Junker mentality that was opposed to democracy. In fact, we have no proof of a correlation on the individual level between French or German influence and activism. On the collective level one example will suffice: the Chilean army, which had been deeply affected by German influence twenty years before the armies of Argentina and Bolivia, remained outside of politics from 1932 until 1973. This kind of reading by juxtaposition is not the way to analyze the influence and political importance of the European models. We must look elsewhere.

The prestige of the formidable German war machine was reflected by its South American disciples. For the Frédéric Thomas Graindorges or Prudhommes of that period the great German General Staff was one of the highest summits of European civilization—along with, of course, the House of Lords

and the French Academy. The recognized excellence of the model was a source of pride and group cohesion. The mirror reflected a flattering image. In addition, the adoption of certain specific characteristics of the German army—the ritualization of military life, the emphasis placed upon the external signs of discipline and upon corporate unity—tended to exaggerate institutional values and to increase internal and external social differentiation. Thus it was the "Teutonic knight" aspect—the "order" in a religious sense—and the mystique of honor that was transmitted rather than Junker authoritarianism. This was not without importance.

The French army drew upon its recent colonial experience in its impact upon the South American armies. In Peru the insistence on the civilizing mission of the military institution in a country of unintegrated Indians was related to the influence of the French mission. The great concepts of the French overseas army were also presented in Brazil. Lyautey was their teacher. Even in 1937 a Brazilian officer raised the question in the pages of a military journal as to the applicability of the program developed by the "great African" concerning "the social role of the officer," concluding,

Because of the extent of its territory, the abandoned children in the provinces of the interior, the low intellectual level of its populace, the problem of lack of unity, the immense effort which will be necessary for it to transform itself into a country made up of healthy and literate men which is economically sound and politically educated, and for the sake of the peace of the continent, Brazil perhaps more than any other country has the right to demand that its army should exercise an educational role.^[2]

We might therefore think that the influence of France was to open the army to sociopolitical problems, while the Prussian model tended to close it in upon its own norms and rules. In fact, in different ways the two models established the prestige, cemented the cohesion, and reinforced the influence of the military apparatus in national life. But imitation of foreign models does not suffice as an explanation of the new political resources that the reformed armies acquired.

Organizational Factors and Military Power

Modernization and the tasks assigned to the military gave the institution a certain prestige and authority in the state and society. One of the peculiarities of the political development of Latin America—with the exception of the Central American and Caribbean semiprotectorates—is the nonsynchronous modernization of the state in which the military played the conscious role of pioneers. Indeed, in many cases, the movement originated from the needs of the army. In a word, the state began to modernize in its military sector, and the rest did not always follow. Military service was established before literacy and universal suffrage. Military strategic doctrines were developed, but no one yet studied the problems of economic growth or the administration of the territory. The increase in military expense with the reorganization and equipment of the army in every country that transformed the institution enlarged the role of the state. The militarization of the state was part of the same process.

Furthermore, the meritocratic procedures used in the selection and promotion of officers gave them a privileged place in the state apparatus. In societies in which the liberal tradition and the interest of the elites had kept the state weak and little respected, and in which the "spoils system" made public service an accidental political reward rather than a career for which one was obliged to prepare, the military now represented a group of stable functionaries—in a way, more or less enlightened professionals among the amateurs who manned the administration. In other words, the "professionalized" corps of officers formed a hard nucleus in a soft and unformed body.

In contrast with the interchangeable civilian bureaucrats, the officers were well-educated elites who were seen as continually improving their capacities through a network of schools and the intellectual and moral challenges of their careers. In the majority of countries the officers were now very proud of the high level of military education.^[3] The Peruvians noted not long ago that in that country a superior officer could spend a third of his thirty-five years of active service in schools and

refresher or specialized courses. In the absence of war, therefore, the armies were transformed into bureaucratic bodies in which institutional rather than "heroic" values predominated. The life of the officer was filled with the application of the "regulation." One of the principal tasks of the foreign missions was to furnish the armies of the continent with a complete panoply of prescriptions that left nothing to chance. Finally, the codification of promotions as a major bureaucratic mechanism formed the mentality of the military officers and distinguished them from the civilian bureaucrats of the same period. The promotion table provided a rhythm for the career aspirations of the personnel. The scale of grades stipulated exactly the degree of seniority required; the promotion councils made up of superior officers deliberated each year concerning individual promotions. Henceforth, officers who were evaluated by their superiors throughout the length of their period of active service no longer depended in principle upon the capriciousness of political authorities—and they were very conscious of that fact. In order to safeguard this cherished meritocracy, the bureaucratic independence of the military institution was carefully protected by its members. Military society was hostile to outside intervention even when it was a constitutional requirement for promotion to the higher ranks.

The feeling of superiority that was produced among the military officers by their consciousness of being an elite group in the state was reinforced by other factors. The creation of a system of high-level technical and scientific education in order to produce certified arms experts and military engineers, as well as access to the modern technology represented by the equipment imported from Europe, gave the military experts in those nonindustrialized countries a clear awareness of their competence. These officers, who had not long ago been ignorant, no longer felt inferior in relation to the doctores —the lawyers and medical men of the political class. What is more, the procedures of recruitment and promotion based on universal criteria made the army a veritable ideal countersociety where, in the eyes of its members, justice, legitimated hierarchy, and organic solidarity ruled. Thus in 1944 Colonel Perón justified the intervention of the Argentine army against the corruption

of civilian society and the state by referring to the perfection of military society:

The internal organization of the army . . . provides an instructive example of discipline, comradeship, patriotism, hierarchy, and respect. In the army there are no unmerited promotions or unjustified punishments. The promotion table [escalafón ] is respected with no exceptions or special considerations, in conformity with a very strict sense of justice—something which is not and should not be to the exclusive benefit of the armed forces but should be considered as a social conquest for all Argentines.^[4]

The fact that the army knew the country better than any other institution, thanks to the distribution of the garrisons throughout the whole of the territories—these being generally underadministered by the civilian government—reinforced the sense of social responsibility that had resulted from universal service. Not only was the army the school for the nation, since its youth were entrusted to it, but its officers knew the problems of the people and therefore of the nation better than the politicians or propertied groups. Here again we find confirmation in Perón's speeches. A year after the 1943 coup, Colonel Perón declared, "We do not speak of the workers on the basis of merely theoretical knowledge. We receive your sons and brothers. We know your pains and misfortunes. We know how the men in our country live."^[5] This kind of feeling does not necessarily produce advanced social views or a revolutionary attitude, but it may assume a messianic dimension. An army that is responsible for the education of a sovereign people and for inculcating patriotism in them can only be made up of citizens who are pure, vigorous, and patriotic, confronting a civilian society that is—alas—corrupt, effeminate, and cosmopolitan. The duties of a military life that lacks heroic grandeur, and the simplicity of an occupation that is oriented toward "action," predispose the military to the rhetoric of purification. The officer is "the priest of the cult of the nation" and consecrates his existence to it. He is ready to offer himself to "regenerate" the body of society, but he is unrecognized and feels neglected by those in power. In these externally oriented economies the cosmopolitanism of the elites who make money in English and

amuse themselves in French helps to produce a feeling among the officers of spiritual and moral superiority that sometimes compensates for an inferiority of status.

The combination of isolation from the society as a whole and the cohesion and prestige of the group produces a haughty, closed quality in military life, a proud withdrawal into the institution that limits one's horizon at the same time that it produces a consciousness of having an important role to play. The overestimation of itself as a special closed group increases the autonomy of military society in the face of government power and at the same time increases its ability to intervene in political life. The professionalized officers of the new armies direct their loyalties to the institution of the military while believing that they are serving the state. Militaristic usurpation is the result of this kind of conduct. For these state armies the seizure of power by the military branch of the state apparatus is only a sort of internal adjustment. The military coup d'état, then, is only an intervention of the state within itself, producing a rupture in which by a sort of metonymy the part is taken for the whole—a sector of the bureaucracy acts as the "universal class" and becomes the government. This is why the corporate problems of the military often become inextricably mixed with social and national considerations. Whatever else it may have been, the modernization of the military was the source of a new militarism whose first manifestations reveal to us its mechanism and purposes.

The New Armies Take the Stage

The relations of the military to politics can take varied forms. Military problems are always political problems, and at the most basic level group pressures are an expression of the power of the army. What interests us here is something else—namely, the extramilitary, and therefore antidisciplinary action of the army that is aimed at achieving political objectives and especially a break in the institutional order. In this context it is important to distinguish the initiatives that are properly military from the support that is given by certain units or officers to

civilian movements that they do not direct. The new militarism obviously falls into the first category. The army intervenes as an institution that is above parties and even is antipolitical. However, in at least one case, that of Argentina at the beginning of the century, the first political activities of the educated officers aligned them with a civilian opposition movement. This would not merit our attention but for the fact that their orientation prefigures that of the coup-makers ("putschists") that shook several countries in the continent during the mid-1920s.

At the end of the last century in Argentina and up to the establishment of universal suffrage through the secret ballot in 1912, the Radical Civic Union saw its task as ending an "exclusionary" oligarchic state and broadening political participation. This party did not refuse to resort to the tactic of insurrection. The "Radical revolutions" mobilized groups of armed militants who tried to use arms to open the way to freedom of suffrage. The career military and the army in general participated in those puebladas (popular coups) in increasing numbers over the years. In 1890, 1893, and even in 1905, many young officers took part in the "democratic coups." According to Hipó1ito Yrigoyen, the head of the UCR, a thousand officers took part in the first coup after the reform of the military.^[6] One of the participants later claimed that two-thirds of the army was involved in that revolutionary movement.^[7] Let us not forget also that the Radicals were the ones who demanded that the establishment of electoral lists in 1912 be entrusted to the army in order to ensure the purity of the vote. This is why a Radical leader could write in 1915, "The Radical Party had two forces—the youth and the army—since both wanted to maintain their integrity in the midst of the general collapse."^[8]

However, in the Radical coups the military remained subordinated to the civilians. A notable Radical was correct, therefore, when he noted the special quality of that military participation:

The military action in support of Radicalism . . . differed fundamentally from the [revolutions] that have overthrown so many Latin American republics. Far from being barracks rebellions they were inspired by the demands of public opinion . . . they were directed by civilians; the people

fought at the side of the army for common civic ideals. . . . It was not ambition that inspired the army, and still less the prestige of some presumptuous general."^[9]

However, when the armies entered on the scene in the other countries of the continent fifteen years later, they did so through "barracks rebellions" that marked the beginning of a new militarism in which ambition or the prestige of a presumptuous general had less of a role than the demands of public opinion and questions relating to the army as a corporate group. In the twenties the military issued pronouncements in a more or less romantic or spectacular way against the status quo in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador.

In Brazil, the uprisings of the junior officers, the tenentes (lieutenants), who were very small in number, represented an armed opposition the significance of which far surpassed its size, effectiveness, or immediate causes. The heroic gesture of a group of idealistic lieutenants who revolted in the fort of Copacabana in Rio on 5 July 1922 rapidly became a political myth. The direct cause of the revolt was a confused and disputed presidential succession, and an alleged "affront" to the army attributed to the president-elect. The tragic deaths of the young tenentes and the weakness of their organization and motives were forgotten. An uprising of tenentes in São Paulo in July 1924 took up the cause of the paulista opposition; although it appeared more serious than the Copacabana disturbance, it too was defeated. The political program in this case, although confused, was relatively explicit, demanding the application of the constitution against the usurpation by the executive. One of its manifestos declared that "the armed forces" had taken up arms to "defend the rights of the people, re-establish respect for justice, and limit the power of the executive."^[10] Another unsuccessful tenentista uprising in Rio Grande do Sul, headed by Luis Carlos Prestes, supported the paulista rebels. The troops fought a long retreat in the famous Prestes-Costa column that marched from Rio Grande do Sul to the northeast and ended in Bolivia nearly three years later. The rebels therefore covered two thousand kilometers while being pursued by the army without having succeeded in involving the caboclos of the interior or producing the "regeneration" of Brazil.^[11]

Based on a vague political and military dissatisfaction, tenentismo never threatened the oligarchic regime of the Old Republic, but because it provided heroes, tragic symbols of the possibility of a rebirth and of a purification of the narrow and corrupt life of politics, the movement of the young officers channelized the aspirations for change of all the socially discontented sectors. It prepared the way for the end of the First Republic and profoundly influenced the twentieth-century history of Brazil by its influence on the conservative authoritarian sectors as much as upon the revolutionary left. Luis Carlos Prestes, the "knight of hope," to use Jorge Amado's description, left the army and became secretary general of the Communist party, while other former tenentes were to inspire and direct the military regime that was created in 1964.

In Chile the sound of the military jackboot was heard for the first time in the corridors of the Congress in September 1924. A military committee made up of young officers demanded that the Congress immediately adopt a series of legislative proposals that it had been considering for months. This is how laws were adopted covering accidents on the job, retirement funds, and wage contracts. Once this had been done, the military called for the dissolution of Congress. President Alessandri left the country when he perceived that the officers with whom he had been cooperating to secure the approval of the social legislation by a reluctant and conservative Congress were no longer obedient to him. A military junta took power. A period of agitation, instability, and reform began that would not be ended until 1932.

The junta, made up of two admirals and a general and supported by the navy, soon began to represent the interests of the oligarchy. On 23 January 1925 the young officers took over the presidential palace, imprisoned the members of the junta, and recalled President Alessandri so that he could finish his term of office. However, it was Carlos Ibañez who was to embody the reforming spirit of the officers who had carried out the coups of 1924 and 1925. After participating as a commander on the military committee that was formed following the pronunciamento of September 1924, he became a minister of the government of Alessandri and his putative successor, after which he

played the role of true head of government before being elected president by plebiscite with 98 percent of the votes in 1927. As general and war minister under two presidents, Ibañez removed the more conservative elements from the army and favored the reformist officers, but his "iron fist" and the authoritarian measures that he adopted regarding popular movements made him appear to the conservatives as the last bastion of order.

Supported by the civilian and military left, Ibañez governed with dictatorial powers, to the great relief of the right. It was in this climate that he organized the corps of carabineros, a kind of national police under the control of the Minister of the Interior. They replaced the local police who were regarded as too responsive to localized political interests. Added to that centralizing institution was the statist economic policy of Ibañez's minister, Pedro Ramirez, which was not well received by the Chilean oligarchy. Ramirez undertook to reform the treasury and the customs; he also sought to give the state the means to intervene financially in the areas of mining and industry while initiating an innovative public works policy. The economic difficulties resulting from the Depression ended these expenditures and led to the resignation of Ibañez in 1931 as a result of a wave of demonstrations by students and members of the middle classes calling for the restoration of civil liberties.

Military agitation did not cease and Chile entered a brief period that conservative historians have called "the anarchy."^[12] The coup d'état against the parliament in 1925 was the result of the dissatisfaction in the ranks of the army with inflation and the delay in the payments of military salaries due to the length and lack of seriousness of the budgetary debates. In 1931 the decision of the provisional government that succeeded Ibañez to cut all the salaries of the civilian and military government employees by 50 percent produced new uprisings. The fleet anchored at Coquimbo mutinied in September 1931 under the leadership of its noncommissioned officers. But these imitators of the cruiser Potemkin were quickly forced to surrender by the army and by the air force, which bombed the mutinous units. On 4 June 1932, air force planes dived over Santiago and dropped leaflets on the presidential palace announcing the So-

cialist Republic of Chile, "which will end the crisis and aid the poor who are exploited by the national oligarchs and foreign imperialists."^[13] Various groups of civilian and military socialists, partisans of Ibañez and populists linked to freemasonry (as was Ibañez himself), gave their support to former Air Force Commander Marmaduke Grove in an effort to overthrow the elected civilian president, Montero. The army did not act, and the carabineros regarded the movement with sympathy.

Thus, the Socialist Republic was born. Its slogan, Pan, Techo, y Abrigo (Bread, a Roof, and an Overcoat) emphasized social assistance to the masses who had been impoverished by the world depression. Its leaders, who rejected both capitalism and communism, proposed to relieve the misery of the populace by reducing unemployment and enlarging the role of the state under a system of economic planning. However, the technocratic and military socialism that "emphasized planning rather than the class struggle"^[14] was only to last thirty days. While a part of the middle class gave quiet support to the new regime, the great interests were against it, as were the international powers, including the Communist party and the United States, which was concerned about its investments. The infantry, convinced that the government had been infiltrated by Communists, once again seized the presidential palace, La Moneda, and deported Grove to the distant Easter Island. A new junta was formed under the presidency of the Ibañista journalist, Carlos Davila, which vigorously repressed the demonstrations and protest strikes against Grove's overthrow. Davila, who announced that the Socialist Republic would be continued, remained in power for only one hundred days. Because of his dictatorial tendencies, the military replaced him with General Blanche Espejo, who promised to respond to the "socialist aspirations" of the people pending the organization of elections after which the military were to return to the barracks—for good, according to the members of the general staff.

The banner of socialism, therefore, was undoubtedly well received by the armed forces. Despite its brevity the Socialist Republic of Commander Grove was more than a tragicomic interlude in a period of intense but transient convulsion. In one year Chile had experienced four coups d'état and seven govern-

ments in succession. The Socialist party of Chile, with its peculiar mixture of nationalism and populism, was established as a lasting result of these convulsions. Grove, for some of his admirers the Luis Carlos Prestes of Chile, and an unsuccessful candidate in the 1932 presidential elections, was one of the founders of the Socialists in the following year. Good relations between the party—which played the game of democracy without rejecting the seizure of power by force—and certain sectors of the army continued until 1973. In addition, when faced with rightist parliamentary obstruction both Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Popular Front president in 1938, and Salvador Allende, Popular Unity president in 1970, were happy to resurrect legislation from the fleeting Socialist Republic that would permit them to carry out the reforms contained in their programs.

Reformist militarism also affected Ecuador in 1925. The export-oriented financial bourgeoisie of Guayaquil, weakened by the cocoa crisis in the immediate postwar period, imposed harsh repression on societal reactions to the recession. In 1922 the liberal government used the militia—the army was not sufficiently reliable—to repress the strikes in Guayaquil against the misery and inflation, killing a thousand people. In the Ambato highlands peasants dispossessed of their lands by a large company resisted and were massacred by the army in 1923. The manipulated elections in 1924 and the weakness of the president finally impelled the young officers to intervene.^[15] As in Chile, the refusal of the military to be used to impose a repressive solution to social problems that those in power could not resolve was an important factor in their decision. On 9 July the League of Young Revolutionary Officers deposed the president and formed a junta before handing over power to an enlightened member of the upper bourgoisie of the coast, Isidro Ayora. Thus began the period that Ecuadorean historians call the revolucion juliana (from julio, July).

For six years power was not in the hands of the Guayaquil bancocracia that had dominated the liberal regimes. For the first time in Ecuador laws were adopted that favored labor and allowed the state to intervene in economic and social life. The first coup d'état in Ecuadorean history that was not dominated by a caudillo and that proclaimed as its goal "equality for all and

protection for the proletariat"^[16] created a Ministry of Labor with a corps of inspectors who were responsible for seeing that the social legislation was observed. The first retirement funds were created at that time, as well as the central bank. Fiscal reforms were also initiated, especially the adoption of an income tax to cover the increased expense of the new policy and the expansion in the number of public servants. Through the introduction of habeas corpus and the recognition of illegitimate children the whole nation was modernized at the same time that measures for the protection of industry produced the beginning of a national development policy.

However, the reformism of the July revolution was timid and only benefited the stable urban workers and the middle classes in the broadest sense. It did not touch the essential areas. In Guayaquil the "golden calf" was still intact. The Bank of Commerce and Agriculture, which was despised by the young officers and which had made and unmade governments in the liberal period, was not affected even as it boycotted the new government. The Indian peasants, comprising more than half the population and reduced to a state of semiserfdom by the "hacienda system," were unaffected by the reforms; the oligarchy of the highlands actually participated in the revolutionary governments. The great Andean landowners were present everywhere from the central bank to the committee that drew up the constitution of 1929. Once the "July officers" had handed over power to the conservatives in order to get rid of the liberal plutocracy, a new military coup d'état in 1931 ended the reformist experiment to the benefit of the most reactionary forces of the highlands.

The Autonomy of the Military and the Liberation of the State

We may be surprised today that the military entered the scene on the left. However, the reformist tone of the new militarism is undeniable. While the intervening arms were not—as a Brazilian officer claimed in 1931—the "avant garde of the people," the military activists of the first part of the century defended democratic measures, took the part of the workers,

fought for representation and justice, and forced the adoption of social legislation. Their progressivism is explained by some as reflecting the role of the army as the political representative of the middle classes, incorporating them into the political system.^[17] This hypothesis enables one to explain the changes in the conduct of the military in a direction opposed to the lower classes once the participation of the middle classes had been assured.^[18]

This interpretation, when rigorously applied, can account for the military participation in movements of civilian opinion aimed at establishing a broadened democracy in Argentina. However, it does not explain the independent and strictly military intervention of officers who distrusted civilians and had little relation with them, and were far from sharing the liberal values of the middle class. Antiliberal, centralizers, authoritarians, and nationalists, the reformist officers were not in ideological agreement with those classes that they were supposed to be representing.^[19] Their character as salaried members of the public service—which made them part of the middle sodal sectors—was not restricted to the junior officers or to the reformers alone. In addition, it is well known that tenentismo, like other progressive military movements of the same period, involved only a minority of those "middle classes" in uniform. In fact, while they are indeed salaried, one too often forgets that the principal allegiance of the military is to the state and that the reformist interventions of these young officers had institutional motives that were not very different from those of the conservative coups that ended or succeeded them.

We have discussed the corporatist motives that set off the coups of the 1920s. Certain variables among the different nations ought to be identified. Thus in Brazil, the military were evidently very aware of the role of the army as the guardian of the republican institutions that it helped to establish. We may also believe that the younger officers were more responsible than the others. However, apart from individual differences, the resources provided by modernization and the normative attitudes that were transmitted influenced structures and produced attitudes in ways that transcended frontiers. Military intervention occurs in the space in the state and the nation that

is occupied by the modern Latin American armies. However, its meaning is not predetermined; above all, it relates to the stabilizing role that the armed forces believe they have and that follows as a consequence of their formation. "Today," writes an Argentine colonel in 1915, "the army is the nation. It is the external armor that guarantees the cohesive operation of its parts and preserves it from shocks and falls."^[20] Twenty years later you could read in the Revista Militar of Buenos Aires that "the mission of the army is to maintain the collective balance against wind and storm."^[21] In Brazil the editors of the influential journal A Defesa Nacional defined the responsibilities of "the military class" in its first issue, published in 1913: "The army needs to be ready to preserve and stabilize the social elements in action. It should be prepared to correct the internal disturbances that are so frequent in the tumultuous life of developing countries."^[22]

If we read these texts carefully we see that they describe projects that are to be carried out by an enlightened elite that is dedicated to the state. They do not express a political orientation. The attitude of messianism, above and beyond society, that they reveal does not involve an emphasis on law and order. Rather it demonstrates a clear desire to defend what exists, not as a response to the directions of the society, but in order to preserve the interests of the nation as the military see fit to interpret them. That can mean opposing the participation in power of a group or class that could endanger the collective equilibrium, or on the other hand taking action to save the system from its own beneficiaries. The role of the military is seen as dosing or opening the system, imposing necessary reforms or rejecting them, all in the name of national cohesion and therefore of defense.

The reformism of the military is also included among those imperatives. In a way the Latin American armies try to "liberate the state from the burden of social class" so as to make it more autonomous and better able to carry out its mission.^[23] This is the objective of the new antioligarchic militarism that we have described. But the state is neither as neutral nor as autonomous as the military bureaucracy believes and hopes. The witness of history argues against that bureaucratic illusion. Indeed, we

only need to see how the reformism of the military was eliminated or absorbed in the period of economic crisis that began in 1930 to understand that the state is not above class, but is rather a synthesis of the relation of forces subject therefore to changes in which all classes are not as equal as the organicist thinking of the professional soldier assumes.

We have seen how the revolution of July in Ecuador died. In Chile events proceeded more democratically but no less clearly. Normal elections were held in 1932, resulting in the victory of former president Arturo Alessandri, who was supported by the traditional parties. This time the former leader of leftist liberalism, who had been called back to power by the progressive military in 1925, was to govern on the right. His second presidency (1932–38) marked a return to conservatism. What is more, Alessandri utilized the Milicias Republicanas, a kind of paramilitary white guard, against the danger of a possible resurgence of military leftism, thus effectively demilitarizing the Chilean political system. He was so successful that from his presidency until 1969 Chile appeared as a democratic and civilian-dominated exception in the unstable panorama of the continent. The myth—supported by dominant interests—of an army that was apolitical and "professional" was thus established in order to eliminate the radical activism of the socialist-oriented officers.

While Brazil, as we shall see, presents a certain distinctiveness in the timing of the emergence of progressive elements—and in their conversion to genuine conservatism—restorationist or simply antipopular militarism was at work in 1930 in many countries of the continent. In Argentina under a democratic system in which the army had been out of politics since 1905, President Hipólito Yrigoyen was overthrown in 1930 by General José Uriburu. The new leader wished to reestablish against the parvenus of the Radical party the traditional elites of proven capacity because of their family experience in public life. Against the general will and "electoral arithmetic," he wished to hand over power to the "collective reason" of the more enlightened. The new authorities took the direction of the national economy into their own hands, ignored the workers, and cut back on the government programs that, under the demo-

cratic regime, had been an important way to redistribute the revenue of the nation to the middle classes. The new regime also intended to reduce the expenditure of the state and to reform the political system so as to prevent the "plebeians" and demagogues from ever taking power legally.

In Peru, where the army—which was despised by the ruling circles—had never been involved in reform, a coup d'état by Colonel Sanchez Cerro which overthrew Augusto Leguia after eleven years in power seemed to be another example of traditional military caudillismo. However, in the face of the disturbing rise of Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA),^[24] the violent popular revolutionary movement, the ruling classes that had long been civilian in their orientation put aside their distrust of the military and supported the colonel's coup. The massacres in Trujillo in 1932 involving the army and the APRA were to establish a long-lasting defensive alliance between the military and the upper bourgeoisie. The Peruvian army clearly appeared at that time as "the watchdog of the oligarchy."^[25]

The situation was more complex in Brazil where outnumbered tenentes who had been defeated in the 1920s seem to have had their revenge in the 1930 revolution that put an end to the Old Republic and brought Getulio Vargas to power. The victory of the revolution in 1930 that began as conflict within the oligarchy was due to a series of military factors among which the tenentes only played a minor role. A disparate coalition was produced by the participation of the antitenentista sector of the army in the uprising; the last-minute defection of the military hierarchy that took the side of the dissident states of Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, and Paraiba against the attempt of President Washington Luis to appoint a paulista successor; and, finally, the unnatural alliance of a part of the tenentes with the leaders of the old political class, their former adversaries. In the disparate political climate that resulted, tenentismo was swallowed up. Getulio Vargas, relying upon the support both of the reformist centralizing authoritarian tenentes and that of the local politicians, "in order thus to avoid a return to the oligarchical state and to militarism,"^[26] moved quickly to discipline tenentismo and to take over its political goals. It is still not clear today

whether the Mussolini-inspired Estado Novo that Vargas established in 1937 involved the realization or the final liquidation of the confused ideas of the young revolutionary officers.

Out of that unusual set of events two elements were to remain—one of them inherent in the character of the continent and the other without doubt the direct result of the recent modernization. One is struck, first, by the tendency to strengthen the state that is common to all the experiences of reformist military. This was true, in fact, both for the socializing military and for their equally activist opponents. Leaning more toward totalitarianism than to populism, a Brazilian officer who was hostile to tenentismo summarized its political goals as follows: "The state should have the power to intervene, to regulate every aspect of collective life, and to discipline the nation."^[27] The worship of the state is thus one of the constitutive elements of military ideology at the beginning of the century.

In addition, another striking characteristic of the military of this period, without being universally true, was the generational and hierarchical divisions in the internal politics of the coups. This phenomenon practically disappeared in later periods, not because the captains and the generals always thought in the same way on current problems but because the later interventions that were usually institutional in character did not permit such hierarchical conflicts to develop, and because organizational and technical changes made pronouncements by young officers more and more unthinkable. Henceforth, as one Brazilian general who boasted of his strict "professionalism" clearly stated it: "It is necessary to make the politics of the army, not politics in the army."^[28] In any case it is from this period that the belief arises (now discredited in this age of counterrevolutionary warfare) that generals are always more conservative than captains and that the junior officers, since they are not part of the establishment, have a certain tendency to question the status quo.

5—
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon?

So far we have discussed the armies in the independent nations in the continent and omitted the semiprotectorates that were directly influenced by the United States. While the American authorities until World War II did not press to participate in the training of the South American military,^[1] this was not the case for the Caribbean and Central America. The neocolonial armies that were organized there by the United States and most often trained by the U.S. Marine Corps deserve special treatment, not only because of the nature of their creation and the states of which they are a part, but for two more decisive reasons as well. First, the military in these areas deserve our attention because of their political impact and praetorian role, which is symbolized by the two infamous names of Trujillo and Somoza. Second, armies in the semiprotectorates are important because of their role as formative agents for the United States as it became the giant world power that we know today.

In fact, the rise of United States imperial power that paralleled the decline of Europe, beginning with the Second World War, contributed in a major way to the limitation of the sovereignty of all of its southern neighbors. There is reason to believe that the United States, in extending its security frontier to the whole continent, attempted to impose on all the countries of the region a military tutelage that was similar in its objectives to that which existed in its Caribbean defense perimeter. In any case, beginning in 1945 the other states in the continent that had previously been in different situations of dependence and

not always upon the "big brother" of the north now found themselves in the same situation as the micronations of the Caribbean—dependent economically, culturally, commercially, and militarily upon a single metropolitan power in the world. Understanding the characteristics and the consequences of the military presence of the United States in the "protectorates" of its strategic southern frontier will enable us to have a better appreciation of the realities and limits of the control by the Pentagon of the armed forces of the subcontinent after World War II, while avoiding hasty schematizations and conclusions. To do this we must recall certain historical aspects of the relations among the Americas.

If the defensive declaration of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 (America for the Americans) seemed to establish the principle of a special responsibility of the United States for the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, the Americans were very busy extending their own territory and did not become interested in the rest of the continent until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their "Manifest Destiny" was, first of all, the Pacific. However, in 1880 the industrial production of the United States was equal to that of Great Britain, which it surpassed in 1894.^[2] At that point, an economic power was born. In 1889, as American imperialist groups developed their colonial projects, the United States convened the first International Conference of American States in Washington. The arrogance of American prosperity impressed the "Latin" delegates; however, proposals for an arbitration tribunal and a customs union were not adopted. Senator Beveridge continued to call for the opening of the Latin American market to Yankee products as their natural outlet. The ease with which the United States defeated a decadent Spain in 1898 and "liberated" Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines initiated an era of external expansion. The first Roosevelt, a brutal devotee of the "policy of the big stick," not only "took Panama" where the United States imposed its colonial enclave for a canal in 1903 but established the policy of the application of force to the southern nations as a principle. Through the "Roosevelt corollary," which the president added to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, Washington offi-

cially gave itself an international police power in the neighboring countries.

Just as the United States considered the Caribbean region as an internal sea, the control of which was indispensable to the national interest, so also the Central American isthmus was viewed as an internal line of communication between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States from the period prior to the construction of the Panama Canal. In addition to these geopolitical considerations the United States also had important economic interests that had replaced those of the Europeans in some of the countries of its southern preserve. The United Fruit Company and the National City Bank became symbols of that economic domination. Establishing themselves as the gendarmes of mare nostrum, the Americans reserved the right to intervene militarily in that "vital security zone" any time that, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, "repeated misconduct and a failure of power results in the general relaxation of the bonds of civilized society."^[3] The principle of intervention was even written into the Constitution of Cuba after it was freed from Spanish domination.

The American occupation troops did not withdraw from the island until the Platt Amendment had been accepted, providing among other things that "the government of Cuba agrees that the United States may exercise the right to intervene to preserve the independence of Cuba, to maintain a government capable of assuring respect for life, property, and liberty" and observance of its international obligations.^[4] The overthrow of a conservative pro-American government in 1906 produced a second occupation of the island by the marines that was a prelude to a series of military interventions; these, in turn, were followed by occupations of more-or-less lengthy duration and the direct exercise of administration by the United States in other countries in the region—Nicaragua in 1912, Haiti in 1915, Santo Domingo in 1916. In fact, the Dominican Republic was occupied from 1916 until 1924, Nicaragua twice (1912–25 and 1926–33), and Haiti was "protected" by the marines from 1915 until 1934.

Whatever the date of the withdrawal of American troops, it

was carried out under the same conditions. Before departing, the United States created a force of military police to replace the marines and to defend order, peace, and U.S. interests. These new-style armies were responsible for maintaining Yankee hegemony while sparing the tutelary power the substantial political and diplomatic costs of direct military intervention. In addition, these forces, gratuitously imposed on nations of limited sovereignty, gave rise to a militarism that had special characteristics.

From Yankee Occupation to Substitute Armies

An undersecretary of state wrote in 1927,

The territory of Central America, including the isthmus of Panama, constitutes a legitimate sphere of influence for the United States if we take our security into serious consideration . . . Also we really do control the destiny of Central America, and we do it for the simple reason that the national interest dictates such a policy to us.^[5]

The withdrawal of the occupation troops that was carried out in response to pressure from South America and in the face of the destabilizing resistance of guerrillas (Sandino in Nicaragua, the Cacos in Haiti, and the Dominican gavilleros ) did not change anything with respect to the continuing American interests in the area. The Good Neighbor Policy adopted by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, which involved the tactical abandonment of direct intervention and attempted to reduce tensions in the hemisphere by promoting peaceful penetration within the "Panamerican" system, was to use other means to achieve the same regional objectives. The departure of the marines was not meant to open the door to "revolution" or disorder. The creation in the occupied countries of "constabularies" (a kind of gendarmerie that for a long period in Nicaragua had the Spanish name of constabularia, so visible was the foreign hold) had two purposes: first, to suppress the national armies that were considered by Washington to be a source of instability,^[6] and second, to establish nonpartisan military forces—that

is, forces that were independent of all the national actors, but loyal to the former occupier.

In Cuba, "which had become a nation without having an army,"^[7] the American military administration that departed from the new republic in 1902 left behind a rural guard on the Mexican model, as well as the Platt Amendment as a kind of insurance and reinsurance. The mission of the rural guard was to protect the sugar cane plantations. The Damoclean sword of the amendment strengthened the power of conservative governments against any "revolutionary" attempts by their liberal adversaries. Nevertheless, the liberals rose up in 1906 and the United States considered it its duty to intervene. The marines landed a second time and occupied the island, which they "pacified" by disarming the insurgents. The occupation had no popular support, and the American authorities became aware that the application of the Platt Amendment would lead either to the annexation of Cuba, or to repeated interventions that could involve the American troops in an extended conflict in which the United States had much to lose, especially in terms of its international prestige. An alternative solution was to Cubanize the intervention so that with the help of the United States Cuban nationals would maintain order and internal security and put down any attempt at revolution and social agitation. Thus, a Cuban standing army was created as a result of the "bilateralization of the Platt Amendment,"^[8] which became a treaty with the metropolitan power and in fact the real constitution of the island until 1959.

The protection of foreign property and of a stable government that could defend it was therefore entrusted from that time forward to a national army trained by American advisors. Its officers received education and advanced training in the United States. All their equipment was provided by the protecting power, which obviously attached political conditions to its deliveries. By nature a counterrevolutionary force, created by an American occupier obsessed with the need for stability, a product of a broadened interpretation of the Platt Amendment, the Cuban army was basically conservative and hostile to any political and social change. It represented the guarantee of a sociopolitical order acceptable to the United States, and in that

sense it had almost no national legitimacy. As an outpost of the United States and the representative of Washington in Cuban politics, that military institution appeared to be a neocolonial force before it developed its own bureaucratic and professional interests. It was despised by all classes of society, therefore, because it did not correspond to the national will or to national desires but rather to the needs of a foreign power. Its political role for thirty years, up to its collapse in 1959, was antinational in character.

While in Cuba late decolonization at the end of thirty years of liberation wars resulted in a precarious and unstable government, Nicaragua at the beginning of the century appeared to be at the point of developing both a modern leading class and a modern state. Long a battleground between the Liberals of León and Conservative caudillos of Granada, Nicaragua had been late in developing and owed to coffee its belated participation in the dynamics of agricultural export prosperity. The Liberal reform of 1893 appeared to be a typical example of modern agricultural capitalism. The Liberal president, Zelaya, had the communally owned lands sold, expropriated certain foreign interests, and undertook to create a modern army. He established a legal military obligation for all citizens, and created an Escuela Politecnica with Chilean military men to educate officers. The results of his program were modest. The generals became primarily political leaders whose rank depended on "their abilities to raise a local army of partisans."^[9] As to military service, while it was universal in theory, it did not replace forced recruitment—as the following telegram sent by a jefe politico to Zelaya demonstrates: "I am sending you three hundred volunteers by train this morning to Managua. Please send the rope back to me since there still many here who want to sign up and their enthusiasm is great."^[10]

Nevertheless, the country changed. Thanks to the tight control of the Liberal dictator, the state began to be established. The traditional oligarchy of tradesmen and cattle raisers, which was expressed politically in the Conservative party,^[11] gave way to a new class of entrepreneurs who were oriented toward the international market. But the nationalism of Zelaya and his sympathy for Great Britain disturbed the United States. That

country saw a strategic value in Nicaragua because an interocean canal could be built there. Washington therefore needed a friendly government in control of a country that was the key to an isthmus vital to the defense and expansion of the imperial republic. In 1909 Zelaya was overthrown and the Liberal reforms were ended with the conscious blessing of the United States—as a result of several carefully orchestrated international incidents and of a Conservative uprising. With the consent and obvious complicity of Washington, the Conservative pro-Yankee oligarchy was put into power. Adolfo Díaz, a former employee of an American company in Bluefields on the Atlantic, became president. However, the Liberals gave him no respite. Ignoring his patriotic instincts, Díaz sent a note in 1911 to the American chargé d'affaires appealing for a military intervention "like the one that had such good result in Cuba."^[12] At a time when the nationalist rebels were gaining territory and controlling the principal cities in the country, the marines landed. In 1912 they amounted to a force of three thousand. The U.S. supervised elections that gave power to Díaz and signed the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty with him ensuring the possibility of constructing an interocean canal over the Grand Lake.

The military occupation gave power to the Conservatives, who were a minority in the country. By 1924 the United States believed that the status quo and the constitutional order were sufficiently assured for them to withdraw their last troops. However, Liberal uprisings broke out against a new Díaz government. The revolutionary government of Calles in Mexico supported the Liberal, Sacasa, who had established a government at Puerto Cabezas in the northeast of the country. Washington, fearing Communism, sent two thousand marine guards to the rescue. This time the Yankee intervention ran into a strong armed opposition of a new type that had a popular base and deeper roots than the troops raised by oligarchic clans. A Liberal "general" led this "national and anti-imperialist" resistance. His name is a symbol and a banner, César Augusto Sandino. The "Bolivarian" hero from Las Segovias, head of a "crazy little army," he gave a continental dimension to his struggle. This "general of free men," who was admired by Barbusse and Gabriela Mistral, by Ugarte and Vasconcelos, whose troops

drew volunteers from all the neighboring countries, carried out an exhausting and relentless war for six years and laid down his arms in 1933 only after the marines had departed.

He did not accept the agreement between the Liberals and Conservatives which had been adopted under the aegis of the United States and which permitted the Liberal Moncada to be elected president in elections that were supervised by the American general McCoy. Those accords, conceived by the signatories as a way to check a social mobilization that was dangerous for the established order, would in the view of the occupying force permit the disarmament of the differing contending factions and the demilitarization of public life. To that end, the United States pressured for the creation of a Guardia Nacional (National Constabulary) that was nonpartisan and was led by American officers with a marine as jefe director until 1932. The guard, which was an army and a national police force commanded by foreign officers that enjoyed the privileges of juridical extraterritoriality, had a colonial and anticonstitutional character that was denounced from the moment of its creation.^[13]

While the United States took great care to eliminate party politics from the ranks of the Guard, requiring the recruits to swear that they had given up any political affiliation,^[14] it made less effort to give the new military force a national character. In 1930 there were only 15 Nicaraguan officers in a total of 120. Engaged in the struggle against the Sandino forces at the side of the American occupation troops, the National Guard was an antinationalist and antipopular force from the beginning. The United States had replaced the private armies of the civil wars with the private army of the United States. Its pro-American tendency continued to the 1970s. From 1956 until its dissolution in 1979 the National Guard was commanded by West Point graduates and the cadets of the military academy founded by the Americans in 1930 spent their fourth year of study in an American school; this was especially true beginning in the 1960s with the establishment of the School of the Americas in the Canal Zone.^[15]

Furthermore, when the marines sought a Nicaraguan jefe director in 1932 who would be useful for their purposes, they found a man who was not too deeply involved in politics al-

though he had participated in the first Liberal uprisings. He was also a nephew by marriage of then-president Sacasa, and in particular he knew English and the United States well, having studied in Philadelphia. Anastasio Somoza García, this improvised general to whom the guard was entrusted, did not stay there long. The last of the marines and the chief of their Nicaraguan janissaries, he knew how to exploit both the unusual social autonomy of the guard and his ties to the metropolitan power. The bloody dynasty that he imposed on the country for forty-five years was indeed the fruit of the intervention.

In the black republic of Haiti, the American occupation was also extended by the creation of a "native gendarmerie" equipped and trained by the U.S. Marine Corps.^[16] The United States, disturbed by the economic interest of the European countries, especially Germany, in a country whose coasts had a key position on the sea lanes to the Panama Canal, followed Haitian developments closely. The government's need for money and the instability of a country that had had six presidents in four years allowed the United States, as part of the dollar-diplomacy policy, to intervene militarily to take control of customs, the national financial system, and then the administration of the country. The Roosevelt Corollary justified this action: were not property and persons in danger because of the Haitian anarchy?

There, too, the occupation troops were to find a very tenacious popular resistance in the Cacos Rebellion that successfully mobilized fifteen thousand partisans under the leadership of Charlemagne Peralte with the objective of "throwing the invaders into the sea." With racism as a contributing factor, the repression was a terrible prefiguring of other American colonial "pacifications," especially in its use of relocation camps for the population. After the assassination of Peralte by the occupiers in 1919, the movement ended in surrender. In two years of fighting the Cacos had lost two thousand two hundred and fifty Haitians, compared to the marines' twenty-seven.^[17]

To complete the pacification and to prepare for the future, the occupation forces after the dissolution of the existing army created a public force in 1916 called the "gendarmerie of Haiti." This force later became the guard (1928) and finally the army (1947)—and it was involved alongside the marines in the "cam-

paign of extermination of the Cacos guerrillas."^[18] From its initiation the gendarmerie played the role of "indigenous occupation troops."^[19] It is true that in 1930, 60 percent of the officers of that body were Americans. The Haitianization of the military forces was to be slow and uninterrupted. The military academy, founded in September 1930 on the model of the U.S. Naval Academy, was also directed by American officers. However, the Guard was to remain a relatively weak institution in Haiti.

In the eastern and Spanish-speaking part of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic was also occupied by the Marines in 1916 under similar conditions to those of its French-speaking neighbor. Instability and bankruptcy were the two pretexts for intervention. In the seventy years of independence since the end of Haitian control of that part of the island in 1844, the Dominican Republic had had twenty-three victorious revolutions. Civil war was the sole functioning mechanism for the transfer of political power. An elite of large landholders fought for control of the government by force of arms without establishing either a stable democracy or a permanent and effective dictatorship. The specialization of agricultural production seems to have been the cause of the fragmentation of the ruling groups. One spoke of the cocoa oligarch, the sugar imperialist, and the tobacco democrat.^[20] The governors of the provinces were actually local military leaders.

Faced with the anarchy produced by the warlords, who with their military uprisings and civil wars helped to increase the national debt, the United States here as elsewhere dictated the establishment of a "neutral" police force in 1916. However, in the Dominican Republic it was not content to prop up a government or to place it under tutelage. The United States simply abolished the local regime and replaced it with a military government with American officers as members of the cabinet. The principal direct consequence of foreign occupation was to destroy the military power of the semiindependent caudillos and to centralize the administration of the country.^[21] The National Guard created by the marines thus became the first regular standing army in the history of the Dominican Republic.

While the resistance to the invader was more localized and less widespread than in the other occupied countries in the

area, the new National Guard was seen as a substitute army for the occupiers and a foreign body. The Dominican bourgeoisie was largely hostile to the United States, and leading families refused to allow their offspring to become colonial officers. Also, the American authorities who recruited enlisted men among the lower-class elements in the cities were unconcerned with the past conduct of the future officers, who were publicly denounced in the press as traitors to the nation.

Thus it was that a former telegraph operator and later chief of the private police force of a sugar plantation joined the gendarmerie of the marines. His rise was meteoric—lieutenant in 1919, captain in 1922, commandant in 1924, and chief of the general staff in 1928. The man with this less than brilliant background, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, would soon be a generalissimo. The future "satrap of the Dominican Republic," the "little Caesar of the Caribbean,"^[22] had the confidence of the marines. His dictatorship was again the poisoned fruit of the Yankee occupation.

The United States would have liked to establish national guards on the model that we have described at least in all the five states of the isthmus, as well as in Panama. However, except for the occupied countries, Washington did not achieve this goal except to a degree in Panama. In fact the new republic established a National Guard shortly after independence without the aid of the United States, although under its watchful gaze. Part police and part army in its character and development, it greatly resembled the similar institutions in neighboring countries. It is understandable that the United States should wish that nations located in areas of importance to its national security should possess military forces that were trained by it, and were therefore responsive to it. But in fact the motivations of Washington were characterized by a combination of Machiavellianism and naiveté. Analysis by responsible Americans, officially at least, was the product of a schematized and superficial view that instability and chronic militarism in the region were simply due to the partisan character of the armies. To remedy this it was only necessary, therefore, to establish armies that were nonpolitical and above parties, professionalized and disciplined. Then you could kill two birds

with one stone, both assuring that the country would be demilitarized, and securing useful internal allies.

This was to forget that in the chaotic and unstable countries in which the constabulary model was put into practice the state was either practically nonexistent or else a notorious anachronism with no social group powerful or dynamic enough to triumph over its rivals and to take in hand the modernization of the administrative and political structure. Thanks to the United States not only did the modernization process begin with the army, but it was imposed by a foreign invader that at the same time removed or crushed the emerging ruling classes and destroyed what remained of traditional institutions, thus eliminating the possibility of constructing a national state. While the external orientation of the military was carried to an extreme, these modern centralized armies, designed only to maintain internal security, only possessed legitimacy in the eyes of the occupying power with whom they maintained relations of more or less strict loyalty. By their nature, these antinational enclave armies could not form the nucleus of the state that they had replaced in the institutional no-man's-land left by the invader. They were thus available for adventure, or were at least ready to re-create the instability that they had been created to prevent.

The Pax Americana and the Order of the Pentagon

The Good Neighbor Policy that ended the military occupations of the Caribbean and Central America guaranteed that the United States would be able to get support for its policy from all of its southern neighbors when the war broke out in Europe. Prepared by a series of consultations among the foreign ministers of the Americas, the entry of the United States into the war following Pearl Harbor in 1941 was supposed to result in the abandonment of neutrality by the Latin American states. The United States promoted this alignment, offering under the Lend-Lease Program to deliver arms to friendly countries while at the same time pressuring those who refused without regard

for their national interests. Thus Argentina, traditionally linked to the British market and a country for which neutrality was a vital commercial necessity, was outlawed by the rest of the continent and its governments were accused of "neo-fascism" by the Department of State.

In the area of economics, the United States demanded that its Latin American allies participate in the war effort by agreeing that the price of commodities be fixed unilaterally and by accepting payment for exports in dollars that could not be used until victory. Some countries, such as Brazil, drew their pound of flesh as a price for closer collaboration with the cause of democracy. Getulio Vargas, although he had created an authoritarian regime on the European model, offered the United States air bases in the northeast, sent a division to fight in Italy alongside the U.S. Army (the Força Expedicionaria Brasileira ) and obtained in exchange and contrary to all expectations a considerable loan from the Export-Import Bank for the construction of a national steel industry.

Generally, the war increased the economic dependence of the Latin American countries on the large nation to the north, as well as the political influence of Washington over the future of Latin America. In 1945 a new epoch opened in hemispheric relations that was to result in different relationships among international forces and changes in the structure of financial and economic dependence. In fact in the interwar period and especially after the Depression, the United States had replaced the European countries that were in serious financial difficulties as the principal source of investment throughout the continent. Great Britain retreated. Its investments fell from 754 million pounds in 1938 to 245 million pounds in 1951.^[23] The United States, which had only $ 300 million in Latin America in 1897, increased its investments to nearly $ 2 billion in 1920, reaching $ 3.5 billion in 1929, $ 4.7 billion in 1950, over $ 6 billion in 1953, and more than $ 12 billion in 1963.^[24] In 1914, the direct investments of the United Kingdom were three times those of the United States. The two countries were practically equal in 1930. In addition, the American influence was extended beyond the "Caribbean Mediterranean" to the large states in the south of the continent. In 1897 Mexico and Central America absorbed

72.8 percent of those investments and South America only 12.4 percent; in 1929 Cuba received 24.3 percent (almost as much as Mexico and all of Central America combined), but South America accounted for 47.2 percent. The share of the Caribbean and Central America dropped from 86.1 percent in 1908 to 52.8 percent in 1929. Trade between the northern and southern parts of the continent followed the same pattern of expansion. U.S. imports from Latin America averaged $ 553 million a year from 1936 to 1940; they represented $ 2.35 billion in 1948.^[25]

Dollar diplomacy proved itself. The principal foreign investor, often the principal or only customer, was no longer a distant European country but a metropolis located in the same continent as its vassals—a giant next door. Thus, the United States was not only both the primary world economic power but also the primary military power, while Europe in the process of economic recovery had difficulty avoiding complete military subordination and the dangers of the cold war forced it to seek shelter under the American "umbrella" and Atlantic integration. Thus, for several decades, at least, the Latin American states were to find themselves alone or nearly so with their enormous protector—a country that represented 6 percent of the world population but consumed nearly half of the resources of the planet, the primary consumer and producer in the world.

Once peace returned the United States began to establish a system of hemispheric security through a complex network of multilateral and bilateral pacts. The overall idea that was to inspire that Inter-American system was expressed during the presidency of Harry Truman as "a closed hemisphere in an open world."^[26] Universalism, of course, but only up to the shoreline. The "zone of vital interests" of the United States now extended to Tierra del Fuego. Yalta had led to this.

The bases of the military system were established during the war with the creation of the Inter-American Defense Board (or Junta Interamericana de Defensa ). In 1947 the Inter-American Treaty of Mutual Assistance signed at Rio de Janeiro established the principle of collective security in the face of extracontinental aggression. In 1948 the Charter of Bogota that created the Organization of American States (OAS) set up the mechanism for the peaceful resolution of the conflicts that might arise

within the inter-American system. The OAS charter emphasized the principle of nonintervention. But Article 6 of the Rio Treaty provided for the case of an "aggression which [is] not an armed attack but [is] capable of endangering the peace of the Americas," a concept that expanded the notion of hemispheric defense in the opposite direction.

This relatively easy and loose multilateral arrangement was based on the principle of a harmony of interests among the countries that were members of the "family of the Americas" in accordance with the paternalist conception of the U.S. Department of State that was accepted without too much disagreement by the governments of the "client" countries. It seems, however, that the American government actually wished to go further in the area of continental defense. A bill for an Inter-American Military Cooperation Act was introduced in Congress in 1946 but was not adopted. It aimed at standardizing equipment, weapons, and organization in order to "make the Latin American armies completely independent of European sources"^[27] since, according to the secretary of war at the time, the United States had "learned during the Second World War that the introduction of foreign (sic) equipment and foreign training methods represented a danger to the security" of the country.

Despite the interest shown by many civilian and military leaders in a military integration similar to that in the North Atlantic, when the Korean War broke out the United States was content to sign bilateral military assistance treaties with twelve Latin American countries within the framework of the Mutual Security Act adopted by Congress in 1951. Latin America was not a defense zone of high priority. Despite the Guatemalan warning of 1954,^[28] Communism did not appear to the American administration as a pressing danger. Military assistance that included training of the Latin American military, grants of used or surplus materiel, and credits for the purchase of equipment represented less than $ 450 million between 1953 and 1963, rising to $ 448 million for the four following years.^[29]

In the meantime the situation in the hemisphere had changed. The Cuban challenge had modified the strategic conceptions of the United States. The appearance of a socialist state one hundred twenty miles from Florida was seen as a serious

threat to the American hegemony over the continent. Therefore, under Kennedy the mission of the Latin American armed forces was redefined. Internal security and the struggle against subversion replaced the policy of a common defense against external aggression. The content of aid also changed. Counter-revolution does not require cannons and bombers, but rather light arms and a firmly anti-Communist ideology. The shift under Kennedy was to tighten the links between the Pentagon and the Latin American armies and to give their collaboration a strongly political coloration.

In emphasizing the "defense of the internal front" against communist subversion and the responsibilities for "civic action" by the armies in order to prevent it, American military aid, beginning in 1962, became more intensive and better institutionalized than before. American military planning became more structured and the relations between the Latin American armies and that of the metropole grew closer. The U.S. Army had military missions of varying importance in nineteen countries of the subcontinent and their presence was often an integral part of the agreements for the sale or loan of military equipment.

The Military Assistance Programs (MAP) of the United States were coordinated by the Southern Command, one of the four large military commands of the United States, which was transferred to the Panama Canal Zone in 1963. The Southern Command (or "Southcom"), the establishment of which was linked to the Cuban situation, was responsible in principle for the defense of the canal. However, that "miniature Pentagon," with ten to fifteen thousand men from all three services who were capable of rapid intervention in case of necessity, represented the military assistance and influence of the United States throughout the continent. Annual conferences of the commanders of the armies of the American states focused on the situation in the continent and on the division of defense responsibilities among the Latin American states. Joint maneuvers such as Operation Unitas of the navies and regional integration agreements such as the one that led to the formation of the Central American Defense Council (ODECA) proceeded directly from the overall defense planning of the American military authorities.

In the case of the navy, the loan or rental of ships by the U.S. fleet facilitated the pressure for close cooperation.

This elaborate network of military collaboration varied in intensity depending on the country. Likewise, for the military mission, the amount of financial aid and the percentage of officers and noncommissioned officers trained in American schools varied perceptibly according to the country. As we see in table 3, the overall amount of financial aid (grant aid program, credit sales, and excess stock program)^[30] is unrelated to the size of the armies except perhaps in the case of Brazil; however, aid can perhaps be linked to the capacity of the country to finance the increases in defense expenditures as well as the Pentagon's estimate of the potential threats to that country. The first factor can explain the low level of aid received by Argentina, but the second would explain the relatively large amounts of aid received by Colombia and Peru where guerrilla movements emerged in the 1960s, as well as the place of Chile and Uruguay.

For a serious understanding of the direct and indirect political consequences of that aid, we must examine how it changed over time. In table 4, we can see that in the years 1962–66, aid is

concentrated on two countries, Argentina and Chile, which at that time were undergoing changes that were decisive for the situation in the continent: the election of a Christian Democrat as president against a "Marxist" in 1964 in Chile, and a Western and pro-American coup d'état in Argentina in 1966.

The number of military men who took courses in schools or training centers in the United States is a still more direct indication of the degree of American influence. Again the variations in time and space are sufficiently significant that one cannot yield to the temptation to draw definitive overall conclusions. The figures on the total number of the Latin American military who passed through U.S. bases shows a decided increase after the Cuban crisis. From 1950 until 1965, 31,600 Latin Americans took courses in the United States or the Canal Zone. That number rose to 54,270 in 1970 and 71,570 in 1975.^[31] As table 5 indicates, the different countries show interesting disparities. Thus Argentina, with the second largest army in the continent, sent substantially the same number of personnel to school in the

United States as did Bolivia, whose army was only one-sixth as large, or Guatemala whose army totaled nine thousand men in 1960, and fewer than Somoza's Nicaragua, which had around eight thousand men under arms. The military history, the economic capacity, the level of development, and the geopolitical situation of the different countries explains those not insignificant discrepancies.

As a real measure of the Americanization of the Latin American armies and of the political influence of the United States it is necessary to differentiate among the types of training and to know their respective programs and orientations. The schools that incorporate the Foreign Military Training (FMT) trainees are numerous and the curriculum varies in level and content so that it is difficult to gauge the impact on Latin American officers. Nevertheless, it is thought that the schools in the Canal Zone—especially the well-known U.S. Army School of the Americas (USARSA) at Fort Gulick where the courses are given in Spanish or Portuguese and are aimed at "giving the

Latin American military the formation that will make them better able to contribute to the security of their respective countries,"^[32] —reflect most directly Washington's conceptions as to the military division of labor in the continent. These are the schools whose courses are the best at communicating an anti-Communist ideology and the philosophy of counterrevolution. The number of military men who have taken courses at American bases outside of the United States is worthy of note. Let us not forget that in 1974 the USARSA graduated its thirty thousandth student. If a maximum of ideological content is dispensed at Fort Gulick and appears to predominate in all the schools of the Southern Command (even in the Inter-American Air Force Academy at Albrook Air Force Base and the InterAmerican Geodetic Survey at Fort Clayton where the emphasis is also placed on techniques of counterguerrilla warfare), the schools in the United States, because they are mixed and have more prestige, can also have an impact that is useful for the Pentagon. The infantry course at Fort Benning, Georgia, and especially the general staff course at Forth Leavenworth and the Inter-American Defense College with admission reserved for superior officers seem to have more attraction for the Latin Americans than the training programs in the Canal Zone. At the extreme, a course in counterguerrilla warfare mixed with simple and heavy-handed anti-Communist indoctrination can produce anti-American reactions, while an advanced technical course for experts in a U.S. military school that is not restricted to the training of foreign officers can create a boundless loyalty to, and admiration for, the American way of life.

In any case, it is undeniable that the USARSA, which is designed to train Latin American officers for internal warfare in accordance with the desires of the Pentagon, gives considerable emphasis to anti-Communism and pro-American indoctrination. Not only do the courses on counterrevolutionary warfare insist on denouncing the enemy, but even the technical courses (commissary, radio operation, etc.) emphasize the "Communist menace." Twenty percent of the officers' program is devoted to Communism. In addition, the students at Fort Gulick are inundated with blatant propaganda brochures in Spanish with titles such as "Qué es el comunismo? Ilusión comunista y realidad democrá -

tica; Expansión del comunismo en América Latina,"^[33] in the best spirit of the cold war. There is no doubt about U.S. desire to influence the politics of the officers.

The purpose of the military aid program after the adoption of the Kennedy-MacNamara policies was to convert the armies of hemispheric defense into forces of internal order mobilized against Communist subversion, thus contributing to the security of "the free world." This was why the armies of the subcontinent were trained in counterguerrilla warfare and in civic action—that is, in nonmilitary projects that are socially useful. The civic action in which the French army was involved in Algeria with their soldier-builders was aimed at bringing the army closer to the most deprived parts of the population where the guerrillas might develop. In that action it was the counterguerrilla forces that were supposed to be integrated among the people.

For the United States all of its military investments were aimed at guaranteeing at the least cost the security of a continent that after 1959 had become a player in the cold war—a secondary player it is true, but one that deserved special attention. The new inter-American military planning, conducted by simply involving the military leaders of the continent, was to transform the Latin American armies into "national guards" amenable to the strategic perspectives of the United States and, at the extreme, capable of aligning their national interests with those of the country that was the leader of the "free world." The official evaluations of the Military Assistance Programs left no doubt as to their very positive results for the United States. A congressional committee concluded in 1970 that the Military Assistance Program had made a major contribution to "strengthening the defense of the free world," especially by "efficiently communicating anti-subversion thinking to several threatened countries" and that it had enabled the United States to "develop military influence in the recipient countries with a very low cost/benefit ratio."^[34] However, for proponents of the program the interest in a policy of Good Neighbors in Uniform^[35] went beyond the global defense of the capitalist world. Military relay diplomacy appeared to be a substitute for the direct intervention of the United States. This could be seen in the cases of Brazil under Joâo Goulart and in Chile under Allende. In Brazil prior to 1964, as well as in Chile at

the beginning of the seventies, in addition to establishing an "invisible blockade" around governments deemed hostile to American interests the government in Washington had been careful to maintain and even increase its military aid (see table 5). Ambassador Lincoln Gordon, in the embassy in Brasilia at the time of the Brazilian Labor party government of Goulart, recognized that military aid was "a major way to establish close real relations with the personnel of the armed forces" and "an important element in influencing the Brazilian military in a pro-U.S. direction . . . an essential factor in limiting the leftist excesses of the Goulart government."^[36]

According to the Department of Defense itself, military assistance is not solely aimed at raising the professional level of the Latin American military in the interest of the common defense; in particular the training carried out by the United States is supposed "to prepare those who receive it to share its benefits with their compatriots when they return home to occupy positions of responsibility and increased influence."^[37] It is easy to understand that the Latin American policy of the United States in the period of the Rockefeller Report (1969) and throughout the Nixon era could at least rely on the power of the military as "a progressive force able to carry out social change in a constructive way,"^[38] that is, in an orderly fashion.

Military Dependence and Its Limits

That American military aid had a political dimension no one will deny, even if there is no direct and mechanistic relationship between the political ends pursued and the real impact of the aid on the armies of the subcontinent. In the United States itself there was no lack of criticism of the antidemocratic political character of that military aid. Public opinion is disturbed to see World War II surplus Sherman tanks breaking down the gates of the presidential palace in the pale dawn of a military coup. In Senate hearings the witnesses and political authorities denounced anti-Communist and counterrevolutionary indoctrination as a source of the aggressive conservatism and inclination to coups of the Latin American military.^[39]

It is undeniable that an anti-insurrectional military theory reinforcing the alarmism that is characteristic of the military leads to a predisposition in favor of the intransigent maintenance of the status quo. The crusading spirit fostered by the tensions of the current situation led to the equation of every desire for change or reform with Communism. Between March 1962 and June 1966—the most intense period of the Cuban crisis—nine coups d'état took place in the continent. In at least eight of those cases the army took preventive action to eliminate a government that was felt to be too weak to take action against popular or "Communist" movements or that was even accused, as in the Dominican Republic or Brazil, of desiring to carry out subversive reforms itself.^[40]

To talk about the denationalization of the armies of the subcontinent in that period is not an exaggeration. A combination of adjectives, occidental and Christian, seemed to have replaced the nation-state in the hierarchy of loyalties of the professional officer. It is true, as B. H. Liddell-Hart has remarked, that "in the majority of the professional armies, a nationalist feeling has become a secondary factor after the military spirit that is produced by training, camaraderie, and a sense of mission."^[41] The French foreign legion is a very good example, of course. However, can one say that without the American influence similar attitudes would not have developed among the Latin American military, or that their conservative orientation was transmitted to them, even imposed upon them by the Pentagon? The most extreme versions argue, for example, that the Latin American military have received a narrow resocialization from the United States and are assigned political roles in conformity with Yankee interests. Fort Gulick, in this view, is the "school for coups" and the armies of the continent are all manipulated by the metropolitan power.

The global and nonhistorical evaluation of the political effects of Latin American military dependence that derives from an instrumentalist conception of contemporary militarism tends both to overestimate the success of "imperialist" policy and to deny national and individual differences. In addition to anecdotal evidence, such as the breakfast of the American military attache with General Castello Branco the morning of the April

1964 coup in Brazil—or still unverified stories, such as the coordination of the military operations during the September 1973 coup in Chile by a "mysterious" U.S. Air Force plane^[42] —the relation between Latin American militarism and Pentagon aid is based only on theories or personal convictions. There is no statistical proof of a relation between military coups and the level of military aid. The degree of democracy achieved in the various Latin American states seems to be independent of the size of U.S. military assistance.^[43] The correlations between those two variables are of very little significance. For some countries an increase in military aid seems to have been accompanied by a deterioration of civil-military relations in the 1960s, but the opposite is true in other countries in the same period. Furthermore, despite the substantial increase in military aid expenditures at the end of 1961 and the change in the orientation of that aid, the results in terms of the relations of the army and the government are unchanged for the majority of countries between 1945 and 1961, and between 1962 and 1970.^[44]

If we take budgetary dependence as a variable that is subject to measurement—that is, the percentage of the U.S. contribution to the military expenditure of each nation—we find that in 1965 Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico all depended on the United States for less than 3 percent of their budget, and Brazil, Colombia, and Chile financed around 10 percent of their military budgets with American aid.^[45] Argentina in the period between two military coups was in the same situation as the stable "democracies"; Brazil under military rule was in the same position as two civilian systems that were believed at the time to be very solid.

It is important not to mix countries and confuse different situations. The armies of the large, more developed nations are those that are the most "professionalized" and the least dependent. These also are the ones that are the least susceptible to the maximalist ideological influence of the USARSA at Fort Gulick. Brazil and Argentina, hardly stable democratic states, send only an insignificant number of military men to the Canal Zone, and even fewer to Fort Gulick (see table 3). On the other hand, the armies of the small Central American countries that are more directly under American control and lack high-level mili-

tary schools and a sophisticated system of defense send substantial contingents to the Canal Zone. However, there too it is necessary to avoid a mechanistic conclusion. Even in Panama, where between 1962 and 1970 more than half of the total membership of the National Guard was trained in the Canal Zone, opposition to change and to social programs does not seem to have been the dominant ideology among the military. The regime that was established in 1968 actually developed a socializing pragmatism whose slogans (soldados, campesinos, machete y fusil unidos )^[46] were not unanimously endorsed by the propertied classes. The specific history of the country, marked as it is by the colonial scar called the Canal Zone, is important in that evolution.

The ambiguity of the pro-U.S. indoctrination is even more evident on the individual level. For one thing we know that former students of religious schools are often the most virulent anticlericals, and for another, at least in terms of brainwashing in the clinical sense of the term, it is difficult to see how training programs typically limited to four to forty weeks could profoundly modify the conduct and values of military men between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five. To attribute their Manichean counterrevolutionary orientation exclusively to the influence of doctrines made in the United States is to demonstrate, if not a lack of perspective, at least a tendency toward gross exaggeration. The Brazilian military have been officially anti-Bolshevik since 1935, the date of the abortive uprising directed against military objectives that has now become a myth—the intentona comunista, the annihilation of which is now commemorated religiously every year by the armed forces. The Argentines go back to the "tragic week" of 1919 as the basis for their antirevolutionary obsession. The Pentagon was not involved. It was also absent from the bloody repression of the Salvadoran peasant uprising of 1932—called Communist by the dictator at the time as a ruse rather than because of the real participation of the Communist party—that ever since has justified the defense of the interests of the oligarchy by the Salvadoran officers.^[47]

We know that twelve of the fifteen generals and colonels in Peru who initiated the nationalist revolution in 1968 went to American schools. General Velasco Alvarado, the leader of that

military revolution—along with General Edgardo Mercado Jarrin, his foreign minister—was the primary defender of a policy of national independence that did not respond to the desires of the State Department and the Pentagon. We know the history of the famous Guatemalan guerrilla leader who died in 1966 at the age of twenty-four, "Commander" Turcios Lima. Before he became head of the "Edgar Ibarra" Guerrilla Front, he was a lieutenant in the Guatemalan army. Upon graduation from the polytechnic school in 1959, he was sent in the same year to Fort Benning, Georgia, to be trained as an antiguerrilla Ranger and to take the marine infantry course. His participation in an uprising by junior officers in 1960 turned him into a Castroite revolutionary leader. How does one explain that conversion? He himself wrote in a letter to his mother, "It seems inexplicable that someone like me who received such a reactionary education in school, then studied for the priesthood and finally became a military officer with good recommendations, should now adopt a course such as this."^[48] His supporters simply recall the poverty of his parents and his "great human sensitivity."

One of the few case studies that we possess arrives at conclusions that are just as indecisive. John S. Fitch, working with a small sample after the 1963 Ecuadorean coup against President Carlos Arosemena, who had been denounced as a Castro sympathizer by the United States, found that the proportion of officers who favored the overthrow of the president was not greater among those who had been trained by the United States than among those who had not. In addition, in discussing the political situation those who had been trained by the United States did not give special emphasis to the "Communist menace," as one might have expected.^[49]

By way of hypothesis, one might assume that the military who request or accept a training program in U.S. schools generally demonstrate a certain sympathy for that country. However, this U.S. training can stem from different, and even contradictory, motives: adhesion to extreme anti-Communism of the McCarthyite variety, or admiration for the largest democracy in the world, the model for the constitutions of most of the countries in the subcontinent. Those two ingredients can be complementary or contradictory. The propaganda in the orien-

tation tours in the United States, and the gifts and brochures glorifying the American way of life have a limited impact: they are preaching to those already convinced. While one might observe that a great number of the military men involved in the overthrow of President Goulart in 1964 had been trained in the United States,^[50] it should also be noted that most of the officers around General Castello Branco, who carried out the coup, had fought in World War II as members of the Brazilian expeditionary force in Italy alongside the American army.

The definition of the mission of the armies of the continent by the Pentagon aroused no more opposition on the part of the military than in the case of the Atlantic Alliance among the armies of Western Europe. In both cases, the alliance was more or less thoroughly discussed and accepted, and its objectives had unanimous support. The ideology of counterrevolution, sometimes developed as in Brazil as a genuine doctrine of national security, but most of the time rudely constructed, was not imposed from outside but was rather accepted, and even created, internally. United States military cooperation was consciously sought by the Latin American general staffs. Thus in 1962, with the aid of the U.S. Army, the Colombian military put into operation the Lasso Plan against the guerrillas without experiencing a spiritual crisis. And there are those who claim that the Chilean military hoped that the Camelot Plan, which woule be ordered by the Pentagon upon the advice of sociologists of the American University in Washington to "measure the potential for internal war," would be carried out; however, the scandal that was created when its existence was revealed did not permit its execution.^[51]

While the hemispheric ideology of counterrevolutionary war and the quasi-dissolution of nationalist sentiment in favor of the concept of the defense of the West often weakened the nationalist reactions of the armed forces of the continent, the increasing Americanization of the armies also had unintended consequences that were greater and more varied than expected. The programs of military aid helped to reinforce the institutional confidence of the officers and to increase their consciousness that they possessed technical and organizational capacities that were superior to those of the civilians. In this respect the

strictly professional and technical training programs acted to reinforce their counterrevolutionary ideological apprenticeship. Aid and loans, as well as the "demonstration effect" of a defense structure that benefited from a scientific defense system based on industrial production with advanced means of calculated destruction, frequently resulted in increased demands for arms purchases. Sometimes, as has been noted, the exposure during the training programs to the life-style of the American military produced a desire for a higher standard of living among the leaders of the most backward armies. This was the case, according to Richard Adams, of the military of Guatemala who received training in the Canal Zone where they received salaries during the programs there that were much superior to those in Guatemala.^[52] The new aspirations of the officers, once they return, motivate them to find additional sources of revenue, whether by combining a civilian position with that in the military, or going into private life. This explains why there are so many businessmen-officers, and especially officers who are large landholders in the areas that are being developed by the state. The financial gap is also related to military involvement in business in several other countries in which an army that has been heavily influenced by the United States (especially Bolivia) clings to power in a spectacular fashion.

However, at the present time such subordination to the United States can be a two-edged sword. Given the policing role that is assigned to the military by the Pentagon in the name of internal security, a sentiment of frustration has emerged in certain armies. In fact, from the redefinition of hemispheric security until the presidency of Reagan—with only a few exceptions under Nixon and Ford—all American governments since 1962 have only been willing to sell the Latin Americans light arms and vehicles that can be used for limited operations to maintain order. The United States refuses to sell the classic heavy weapons—and it is supported in this by Congress and public opinion—because these can be used, in their view, to upset the Pax Americana and to weaken the rear areas.

This is why the Peruvian army, which felt itself underequipped in 1965 when it faced Castroite guerrillas, was unhappy, given its role in national life and its self-image, to be

assigned subordinate functions in the "inter-American military division of labor." This policy produced a certain resentment of the United States, since, according to certain reports, it had even refused to deliver napalm to Peru for use against the guerrillas for fear that it might be used against a neighboring country. It is reasonable to suppose that, following this refusal of the United States and its subsequent insistence on attaching conditions to the provision of arms, the decision of the Peruvian general staff to go to Europe to obtain modern arms was the first step in a policy of nationalist self-assertion and military-directed development.^[53] Paradoxically, besides the fact that Peru thus broke with a single source of arms, the purchase of the advanced weapons turned the army's attention away from internal security problems and helped to weaken the antisubversive obsession that had led it to identify its military objectives with the preservation of the status quo.

Under very different conditions in Argentina, with a military regime that was completely pro-American, the technical inadequacy of the U.S. military aid and its humiliating strategic-ideological content led the leaders of the general staff in 1969 to move away from the Pentagon. The provision of materiel that was often in bad condition; the control of the type and use of armament by its provider; the desire to transform the Latin American armies—even the most technologically advanced—into colonial police equipped for counterguerrilla warfare but lacking any sophisticated weapons, were also reasons for Argentine irritation with the United States programs of military assistance. As a result of these considerations Argentina also went to Europe for military equipment.

The Argentine problems began in 1967, when the cavalry, the pride of a regime whose president was a cavalry general, decided to replace its twenty-year-old Sherman tanks. Since the United States did not seem to be in a hurry to deliver Walker-Bulldog M-41 light tanks, a mission made up of members of the general staff went to Europe and made contact with the Schneider Company in France in order to buy sixty AMX 13s and later to have French arms manufactured under license in Argentina. This policy (Plan Europe) was aimed at giving Argentina freedom to buy modern arms and to break the American monopoly

by developing a national armament industry.^[54] Thus the two great powers of South America, Argentina and Brazil, have become important arms producers today. At the beginning of 1977, when the Carter administration wanted to demonstrate—in a maladroit fashion—its repudiation of the human rights situation in the two nations by reducing military aid, both countries immediately abrogated the military aid agreements that linked them to the United States, which they no longer needed. Fabricaciones Militares in Argentina and IMBEL in Brazil, thanks to their own technology or their European licenses, produce enough for national needs and for export, and in fact have developed a mass production system. We know that certain armies of the Old World have been equipped with Brazilian Xavantes planes and that Cascavel and Urutu armored cars that were sold to Iraq were used in the Iranian conflict in September 1980.^[55] However, that military independence has not changed the political orientation of the military in the two countries, any more than orders for Soviet materiel placed by the Peruvian army under Velasco Alvarado altered the antireformist conservatism of General Morales Bermudez, who overthrew him in 1975.

The political reversal of military dependence can sometimes also result from excessive involvement. In Bolivia at the end of the 1960s, the obvious presence of American military advisers had something to do with the reinforcement of the nationalist sector of the army that involved the country in a progressivist military experiment in 1969. The discovery of the guerrillas in the first months of 1967 and the unusual interest paid to them by the security services of the United States because of the presumed presence of the famous guerrillero, Ernesto Guevara, was a cause of some discontent among the Bolivian officers. Forgetting, first that American aid permitted a rapid reorganization of the Bolivian armed forces that had been reduced to skeleton size by the purges following the 1952 revolution, and also that Bolivia was among the Latin American nations whose military expenses were most dependent on the United States,^[56] the Bolivian officers were irritated—even wounded in their professional pride—by the involvement of foreign officers in operations that the national army felt it was quite capable of carrying out on its own.

The refusal to allow Bolivians to participate in a process of "military cooperation" of the Vietnam type was perhaps one factor in the arrival of the short-lived revolutionary regime of General Juan José Torres.

Global Dependence and Security

The obvious character of its military hegemony and the impulse to identify those who were responsible for its establishment have no doubt led to an overestimation of the military component of the American control of the continent. Besides, it is logical that official spokesmen in the United States should periodically deplore the arms race in Latin America—especially whenever the Latin armies turn to foreign providers to secure sophisticated arms. In fact, Latin America is a continent with a relatively low level of armament—as indicated by the figures on military expenditures in table 6. If militarism is measured by the percentage of the gross national product (GNP) that goes to defense, the European states allocate more to their armies than do the Latin Americans. It is obvious to the United States that Latin America, just because it is so close to the United States (and to the SouthCom), is not a high-security zone that has to be heavily armed.

In addition, in view of the secondary importance of the U.S. military for its tutelary power, the dependence of the Latin American nations on the United States is general and varied, and cannot be reduced to its military component. The nations of Latin America are involved in a network of influence and concern that far exceeds the operation of a military apparatus. There is no need to believe, moreover, that Wall Street, the Pentagon, and the White House always and everywhere present a monolithic front, for there is no doubt that it is in Latin America that the contradictions of North American policy have been most evident. Did not Kennedy's Alliance for Progress insist on the establishment of democratic reformist regimes at the very same time that military aid was educating the armies in counterrevolution?

The American omnipresence, the often-institutionalized ex-

pression of its interests and decisions, invites one to place the military factor in a relative context. In these penetrated economies with bourgeoisies that are largely associated with American partners it is no doubt excessive to use the expression of the Dominican former president Juan Bosch, "Pentagonism is a substitute for imperialism."^[57] The means of economic pressure available to the United States against unfriendly regimes are many and well-known, as is demonstrated by the pressures placed on Cuba after 1960 or the quarantine that choked the Popular Unity regime in Chile. The panoply goes from the suspension of economic aid in cases of the expropriation of Ameri-

can goods without "adequate compensation" (the Hickenlooper Amendment) to the suspension of imports and exports, including replacement parts for American industrial machinery and even cultural items.^[58]

American interference in Latin American affairs has taken many forms, including selective economic aid to opposition elements, as was the case in Brazil, where the anti-Goulart governors received American aid that had been refused to Brasilia. More discrete assistance to the opposition forces was also provided in Brazil and in Chile under Allende, in the form of substantial support for the election of "good" candidates, not to mention the direct and often gross intervention of ambassadors such as Spruille Braden in Argentina at the beginning of the Peronist period, Ralph Dungan under Frei (1964–67)^[59] and Edward Korry under Allende in Chile, and Lincoln Gordon under Goulart in Brazil. To be complete we should also add the omnipresent (and rarely effective) Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), some of the secrets of which have been revealed by Philip Agee. In that area it is clear that cooptation of the openly anti-Communist and pro-American military is less effective than the control of the trade union elements of the radical left by "the Company," such as took place in Ecuador before 1963.^[60] Why speak of the armies as the only repository of United States ideology when we know that at least one Bolivian interior minister has confessed to being in a confidential relationship with "the Agency" (before becoming a correspondent of the Cuban government) and that there are strong presumptions that one foreign minister of the Pinochet government in Chile had been in the hire of the CIA.^[61] In addition, the same suspicions were raised concerning a former president of Venezuela and his Mexican counterpart who both (despite this) were characterized by rather nationalist policies. To place the role of American military influence in its proper context it is necessary to recall how widespread is its ideological hold. How important in fact is the psychological orchestration carried out among the military by the United States in comparison with films, television, the press, and advertising that continually transmit everywhere the values of the American way of life?

This discussion is aimed at placing things in their proper

perspective, not reducing reality to easy ideological or philosophical schemes. That since 1945 the United States has tried to create a reserve force out of the Latin American armies in the service of its long-range interests—and not only its strategic interests—is evident. However, that military relay policy is not sufficient to explain contemporary militarism. Conspiratorial history reveals only the prejudice of those who engage in it. Neither the "hand of the foreigner" nor "revolutionary agents" who have come from outside achieve anything if the terrain is not ready. Neither the U.S. naval squadron near Rio de Janeiro in March 1964 nor the supposed U.S. plane over la Moneda on September 11, 1973, accounts for the fall of João Goulart or the overthrow of Allende. Rare are the armies that passively obey the commands of Washington, even in the protectorates of the Caribbean. As internal actors with specific corporate interests, the armies respond above all to a social dynamic in which external dependence is a conditioning, but not an explanatory element.