Routledge Handbook of Latin American Security

David R. Mares, Arie M. Kacowicz, David R. Mares, Arie M. Kacowicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317965084
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

This new Handbook is a comprehensive collection of cutting-edge essays on all aspects of Latin American Security by a mix of established and emerging scholars.

The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Security identifies the key contemporary topics of research and debate, taking into account that the study of Latin America's comparative and international politics has undergone dramatic changes since the end of the Cold War, the return of democracy and the re-legitimization and re-armament of the military against the background of low-level uses of force short of war.

Latin America's security issues have become an important topic in international relations and Latin American studies. This Handbook sets a rigorous agenda for future research and is organised into five key parts:

• The Evolution of Security in Latin America

• Theoretical Approaches to Security in Latin America

• Different 'Securities'

• Contemporary Regional Security Challenges

• Latin America and Contemporary International Security Challenges

With a focus on contemporary challenges and the failures of regional institutions to eliminate the threat of the use of force among Latin Americans, this Handbook will be of great interest to students of Latin American politics, security studies, war and conflict studies and International Relations in general.

Part I
The evolution of security in Latin America

1
Security Studies and Security in Latin America

The first 200 years

Arie M. Kacowicz and David R. Mares

Introduction

The ontology of security studies has become contested. A field that used to be the purview of military and diplomatic studies, which focused on the big questions of war and peace, has become democratized. Security studies now entails not only the traditional issues confronting states in their international relations, but also domestic challenges to regime stability. These include contestation of the state’s monopoly of force in physical spaces of the country, cultural survival of minority groups within the nation, and the ability of individual citizens to live and work without fear of either criminals or an overbearing government. It is not that these topics only matter going forward; in addition, scholars in the field (historians, anthropologists, and sociologists have always taken a broader view of security) are looking back to reveal how those without a voice (i.e., ‘subalterns’) nevertheless resisted, mobilized, and called for justice and change.

In the context of contemporary Latin America, scholars are investigating multiple topics that have deep historical roots and significant manifestations in the region today. The Spanish ‘conquest’ of this part of the Americas, and even less so that of the Portuguese, was never completed, even after the independent states took up the mantle to subjugate and assimilate the indigenous polities. Though indigenous people do not reject the European defined boundaries, even when it cuts through their communities, they have mobilized around the idea that the survival of their communities (however scattered they may be) requires defending certain values and links to the land, even when the nation’s ownership of subsoil resources is not contested.

The diplomacy of cooperation coexists with that of militarized coercion, just as in the past. Subversion of the political order continues to be of concern, now not by conservatives facing liberals as in the 19th century, or liberals confronting variants of Marxism in the 20th century, but rather by an amorphous group of ‘socialists of the 21st century’ challenging the liberal democratic and economic order. In addition, governments worry about international regimes defending human rights invading their purview today, just as they worried about property rights infringing upon state sovereignty throughout the last two centuries. For scholars addressing these issues, and the NGOs and citizens that follow their work, the topic of ‘peace and security’ is not limited to the discussion of whether 1,000 or more people died in a battlefield-related clash among polities recognized by the United Nations.

Of course, none of these contestations mean that traditional issues of military coercion and diplomacy, of interstate cooperation and conflict, do not matter. Scholars have defined the field of security studies in much broader terms, not rendering the old issues irrelevant. In that spirit of continuity and change, this first chapter of the Handbook of Latin American Security reviews the first two centuries of the study and discussion of relations among distinct polities that affect the security of those polities and the people living within them.

The chapter is organized into three parts. In the first, we consider the historical experience of Latin America, from independence beginning in 1810 to roughly the turn of the 21st century. We argue that the historical record has been read selectively, with the result that not only has richness been lost; we have also misunderstood security outcomes, and thus missed many of the empirical puzzles that drive contemporary research. It is important that we pursue our distinct research agendas based on a shared understanding of the facts. The second section presents our views on how studying security in the Latin American context can contribute to the field of security studies. The section discusses not only how non–Latin American security scholars can benefit from considering the experiences and puzzles in the Latin American case, but also how Latin American scholars have enriched the discipline. The final section teases out the themes embedded in the historical experience, in order to gain a deeper and clearer understanding of how security issues in contemporary Latin America are similar or different from those faced in the past.

Historical overview

Latin America was born into an ambiguous geographical reality. If one compares a map of post-independent Spanish America (1818–1823) with a map of Spanish America in 1883 (at the end of the War of the Pacific), one sees dramatic changes in the boundaries of the political units. In this time period, the United Provinces of Central America separates into five nations and Gran Colombia into three countries (Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador), whereas Guatemala separates from Mexico. Haiti conquers, and then loses the Dominican Republic, and Peru and Bolivia lose significant territory to Chile. To the east, the Spanish American states’ claims to territory around Brazil, equivalent to the size of France, have not yet been settled in favor of Brazil. Further south, Patagonia is not yet divided between Chile and Argentina, while Uruguay, along with much of present-day Argentina, comprised the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. The map continues to change in the 20th and 21st centuries, including Ecuador’s loss of 40 per cent of what it claimed to Peru in 1941, and Nicaragua gaining maritime boundaries in the Caribbean.

In this process of territorial division, Latin American states most often appealed to pre-independence boundaries of the Spanish Empire. Because the Spanish Crown divided its empire into ecclesiastical, administrative, and military domains with overlapping boundaries, at the time of independence the new Spanish American states had legal and historical bases to disagree over the legitimate boundaries of their countries. Even if agreement could be reached on colonial boundaries, some Latin American states appealed to the principle of uti possidetis de jure, while others preferred uti possidetis de facto (the latter quite similar to European notions of ‘effective occupation’ at the 1884 Berlin Conference as a means of regulating competition in the division of Africa).

Even in cases where legitimate boundaries were not the issue, some Latin American states coveted their neighbors’ territories, such as Chile in its northern border and Haiti in the island of Hispaniola. A masterful historical overview of how domestic politics, wealth, and an eye to balances of power affected South America in its first hundred years of independence is found in Burr (1985). The book remains fundamental reading, but for international relations (IR) scholars the challenge is to convert that empirical richness into testable hypotheses about security policies and to bring these empirical cases into the discussion of contemporary security studies.

Wars of conquest among Latin American countries were part of their international relations, even without counting the myriad violent repressions of the indigenous peoples. Within months of claiming its independence from Spain and requesting incorporation into Gran Colombia, the Dominican Republic was conquered by Haiti in 1820 and only regained its independence in 1843. Chile fought its first war against Peru and Bolivia (1836–1839) simply to keep its neighbors weak. Chilean state-builder Diego Portales justified the war in balance of power terms:

The Confederation must forever disappear from the American scene. By its geographical extent; by its larger white population; by the combined wealth of Peru and Bolivia, until now scarcely touched; by the rule that the new organization, taking it away from us, would… exercise on the Pacific… by the greater intelligence if indeed inferior character of its public men, the Confederation would soon smother Chile.

(Burr 1985: 38–43)

Moreover, in the Pacific War among the three countries (1879–1883), Chile took territory from Bolivia and Peru, the defeated countries.

In the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay fought a total war against Paraguay, causing the death of almost 90 per cent of the Paraguayan male population, up to 60 per cent of the total population, and requiring reparations from the vanquished people. The secret treaty among the three allies, which the British revealed at the time, stipulated that the victors would take possession of disputed parts of Paraguay and demand reparations (Brazil cancelled the remaining payments only in 1943!). Brazil enforced its maximum prewar territorial claims; Argentina, however, went beyond that. Initially, Argentina proposed to Brazil that Paraguay be divided between them; Brazil preferred another buffer state (Uruguay being the second) between itself and Argentina. Rebuffed, Argentina sought territory north of what it disputed before the war; only Bolivia’s objection that these claims infringed on its own territorial disputes with Paraguay limited Argentina to its prewar claims. The punishment wrought on Paraguay led Chile to complain to the victors that a South American country should not be treated in the way that Europeans dealt with Poland. Interestingly enough, U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes arbitrated one of the settlements, ruling in favor of Paraguay, which honored him by naming the province Presidente Hayes.

There were other wars of conquest. Bolivian Marshall Andrés de Santa Cruz sent his army into Peru to favor an internal rebellion led by those willing to become part of a confederation with Bolivia. Santa Cruz also favored the government’s opponents in the Argentine Confederation. The Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas feared that Santa Cruz also wanted to bring his country into the Bolivian Confederation, and preemptively attacked Bolivia in 1837. Argentina and the Empire of Brazil fought two wars over control of the eastern bank of the Río de la Plata (Cisplatine War, 1825–1828, and Platine War (La Guerra Grande), 1851–1852). The stalemate and Britain’s mediation led to the creation of Uruguay as a buffer state in 1828. Peru invaded southern Ecuador in 1859, retreating only when Colombia and Chile protested Peru’s efforts to alter the regional balance. Bolivia’s invasion of Paraguay produced 100,000 deaths in the Chaco War (1932–1935), with Bolivia seeking more territory than it claimed under uti possidetis de jure and the final peace rewarding Paraguayan advances deep into the Chaco rather than based on legal arguments. Peru’s invasion of undisputed territory in southern Ecuador in 1941 coerced Ecuador into withdrawing its claims on territory in the Amazon, which amounted to 40 per cent of Ecuadorian-claimed national territory. No Latin American country came to Ecuador’s aid, and all were willing to accept Peru’s condition that a withdrawal from occupied Ecuador required that country’s recognition of Peruvian claims in the disputed Amazon. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States served as guarantors of the peace treaty, but the terms were those imposed upon Ecuador by Peru and recognized the reality of Peru’s conquest, rather than resulting from a legal interpretation of historic rights (Burr 1985; Wood 1966).

As this brief overview begins to document, the wars of the first 70 years of independence had far-reaching consequences. States were created, confederations of states ceased to exist, and the position of states in the regional hierarchy was dramatically altered. The break up of the United Provinces of Central America led to four wars over 70 years to recreate it under either Guatemalan or Nicaraguan leadership. War also had implications for the regional distribution of power, as a Central America united under the auspices of one state would make it a more important player in regional politics. Perhaps the greatest impact of war on the regional hierarchy of states comes from the War of the Peru/Bolivia Confederation (1836–1839) and the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). Those wars thwarted Bolivia and Paraguay, which had achieved domestic stability and were beginning to progress economically; their contemporary status as the poorest states by far in South America bears witness to the devastating impacts of the wars. By one estimate, 77 per cent of government budgets between 1820 and 1860 in Spanish America were spent on preparing for and defending against violent confrontations with neighboring countries, thereby limiting capital availability for economic development (Bates et al. 2006).

Many of these political units were also defining their internal boundaries, finishing the conquest begun by Spain 300 years earlier. These were the wars against the indigenous peoples in order to subjugate them to the European-descended Latin American elites, particularly against the Yaqui in Mexico (1867–1910) and the Mapuche in southern Chile (1861–1883) and Argentina (1879–1880). Given that these indigenous communities did not perceive themselves to be part of the particular Latin American country they were fighting, we can consider these to constitute extrasystemic wars and thus part of the region’s international relations. This is a particularly apt classification for scholarship in a region that at least rhetorically seeks to contest Eurocentrism.

In the realm of ideational issues, the idea of a Western Hemisphere or Spanish American identity, with norms of behavior distinct from other regions, is not all that different from the European belief that Europe was distinct from the rest of the world–Christian, civilized, advanced–and therefore Europeans should get along with each other (i.e., the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, and the Congress of Vienna, 1814). Likewise, the tension between Pan-American or Spanish Americanism and national identity has also been present in Latin America. In short, Latin America behaved very much in line with its Western roots. As Burr notes, “South American statesmen accepted the axioms and techniques of European power politics. They used this jargon and did not hesitate to employ its forms of coercion in dealing with problems of intra-South American relations” (1985: 6).

The familiar narrative of 19th century Latin American interstate relations focuses on Simón Bolívar and José Martí and their desires for Spanish American unity, particularly against the United States, and laments that their visions for a united Spanish America had been consistently undermined by short-sighted leaders. But we do not often see alongside Bolívar’s name those of his opponents and why they objected to his vision. For instance, Marshall Andrés de Santa Cruz in Bolivia and Diego Portales in Chile objected to Bolívar’s plans for a lifelong presidency and a legislature that included a chamber of censors whose members served for life. There were also intellectuals and statesmen arguing that neighbors could not be trusted. Brazil’s great statesman, the Barón Rio Branco, distrusted Spanish America, but he believed it was necessary to get along with one’s neighbors. Conversely, Rio Branco sustained that Brazil and the United States had significant commonalities and that there should be an informal alliance between the two countries (Bradford Burns 1966). Whereas Brazil perceived commonalities with the United States up to the 1970s, it would be difficult to read Peruvian or Bolivian history texts and conclude that those two societies found great commonalities with Chile.

Another prominent intellectual an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of tables
• Preface by John J. Mearsheimer
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• PART I The evolution of security in Latin America
• PART II Theoretical approaches to security in Latin America
• PART III Different ‘securities’
• PART IV Contemporary regional security challenges
• PART V Latin America and contemporary international security challenges
• Index