Latin America Risks

Becoming the Land of

Militarized Democracies
BY Javier Corrales | October 24, 2019

This piece has been updated

When Chilean President Sebastián Piñera went on television

to extend the country's state of emergency on Sunday, he
was surrounded by military figures – trying to convey a
message of strength and unity amid massive protests and
violence in the streets. Inevitably, comparisons with Chileʼs
dark military past flooded the Internet.

Only two weeks before, Ecuadorians had witnessed a similar

scene. As demonstrations against a multi-billion dollar
austerity program spiraled out of control, President Lenín
Moreno appeared surrounded by his generals to impose a
nationwide state of emergency. In both countries, the army
was deployed to the largest cities with a broad mandate to
re-establish order.

Latin America used to be known as the land of the military

junta. It is now at risk of becoming the land of militarized
democracies.
The scenes from Ecuador and Chile are a warning that
democratically elected governments throughout the region,
facing rising domestic unrest, are relying on the military to
survive. If history is any guide, this does not end well.

Social unrest has spread throughout Latin America in the

past several years. The relatively quiescent period that
prevailed during the era of the latest commodity boom,
which spanned from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, has
come to an end. As governments confront the need to
reduce spending, often to pay for the debt left behind by
populist governments, they have targeted vulnerable
sectors. Unable to deliver high economic growth,
governments are disappointing the middle class. In
response, vulnerable and middle-class sectors decide to
protest. Some of these protests have resulted in violence.

To meet this unrest, governments have decided to rely on

the military and intelligence agencies. In Ecuador and Chile,
security forces used brute force against protesters – with
some videos of abuses going viral online. In Brazil, protests
surrounding the Amazon fires prompted President Jair
Bolsonaro to turn even more openly to the military for
support; under Bolsonaro, the generals have gained a level
of power in government unprecedented since the country's
return of democracy. In Bolivia, President Evo Morales just
called on the military to respond to protests surrounding
irregularities in the recent elections, arguing, as if he had
never lived in his own country, that “the armed forces unite
all Bolivians.” Militarized responses by governments are
generating casualties and exacerbating polarization.

Democracies are supposed to limit the powers of the

military. This is especially important when there is a long
history of military intervention in politics, as is the case in
Latin America. But what we are seeing is that when
democratic governments feel threatened, they are tempted
to expand the powers of the military. In Mexico, the ongoing
drug war prompted Congress, controlled by the ruling party,
to approve a new National Guard composed largely of
soldiers almost unanimously. In Uruguay, voters could pass
a tough-on-crime security reform in a plebiscite on October
27. The reform would create a National Guard and tasks
soldiers with assisting police after a spike in domestic
crime.

Empowering the military is worrisome, even when most

citizens support the idea. Governments end up being
indebted to generals. Generals get too used to certifying or
setting policies. Policies become too focused on the need to
maximize security. And security is conceptualized mostly in
terms of repression.

Left and right versions

The trend toward militarized democracies in Latin America
did not start in 2019. In the 2000s, Latin Americans
celebrated (or bemoaned, depending on their ideology) two
trends in the militarization of democracies – one on the left,
the other, on the right.

On the left, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela popularized the

notion of a civil-military alliance to help the poor and defend
his revolution against “reactionaries.” On the right, Álvaro
Uribe in Colombia popularized the notion of reliance on the
military to achieve “democratic security,” defined primarily
in terms of fighting guerrillas and drug lords.

Today, Chávezʼs legacy of using the military to defend

revolutions is dominating politics in Venezuela, Cuba,
Bolivia, and Nicaragua. The Uribe model of relying on the
military to defend citizens against crime is popular in Brazil
and much of Central America.

And now, we are seeing a new justification for militarization:

to deal with organized civil society.

The problem is that often times organized civil society in

Latin America is not that civil. The recent wave of protest in
Latin America has different causes, which vary depending
on each country. Yet all protests are exposing the traps that
Latin American societies find themselves in – and that is
why they are so powerful.
We used to think that the regionʼs worst trap was poverty
and inequality. But in the 2010s we realized that these two
traps were not that inescapable: countries were able to
introduce policies to reduce them.

The regionʼs most difficult traps now are different and

harder to address. There is the middle-income trap, or the
idea that the Latin American labor force is too expensive
and underskilled (or under-incentivized) to compete against
tech exporters, thus curbing growth and diversification.
Another trap is resource dependence. In the 2000s, Latin
America returned to overreliance on commodity exports.
Now that the price of oil, natural gas, soybeans, and copper
is down, the economies are contracting, even when
macroeconomic management is decent. Finally, there is the
party trap. In some countries, citizens are trapped by
political parties that refuse to open up the political system
to new forces or are catering too much to extremists.

Latin Americaʼs rising unrest has far more to do with the

middle-income, resource, and party traps than perhaps the
traditional poverty and inequality traps. This is the reason
we are seeing protests in countries that are no longer that
poor. This moment of unrest thus represents an opportunity
for governments, citizens, and international lenders to
activate discussions about how to unlock these new traps.
There are no easy answers. But one thing is clear: over-
empowering the military is never the solution to any of these
challenges.

This piece has updated to clarify the nature

of Piñera's announcement on Sunday.

--

Corrales is a professor of political science at Amherst

College and member of the editorial board of Americas
Quarterly. The second edition of his co-authored book
Dragon in the Tropics: Venezuela and the Legacy of Hugo
Chávez came out in April 2015.