In this study Isaac Sandoval analyzes military interventionism from the perspective of economic dependency. His main theme is that Latin America has gone through four major political crises in each of which the military has intervened to defend certain economic interests or social groups. Briefly stated, the first crisis was the Independence struggle that led to political, but not economic, emancipation. The second occurred when political power passed from the liberators to regional caudillos, who were to serve as guardians of oligarchic interests. The third crisis arose a century later when the force of “demo-bourgeois populism” emerged to challenge the traditional oligarchy. The fourth—and current—crisis arises from the confrontation between popular forces and the national bourgeoisie and multinational corporations.
Following the line of the more radical dependentistas, Sandoval states in a long chapter on “Nationalist Populism and Continental Military Occupation” that after World War II, the traditional concept of national security gave way to that of “pentagonismo,” whereby the state forms part of a hemispheric community whose purpose is to perpetuate the capitalist system. Latin American armies no longer defend national frontiers but serve instead the hegemonic interests of the United States by ruthlessly imposing internal order and by standing ready to defend imperialism through inter-American defense agreements. He labels as “colonial-fascist” dependent regimes that use military force to impose imperialist control, the most notorious being Brazil’s.
The author, a Bolivian who was labor minister under leftist President Juan José Torres (1970-71), presents, within a Marxist framework, a sweeping indictment of the old and the new imperialism, but he breaks no new ground in analyzing Latin American-style militarism. The study contains very little original research, ignores much of existing scholarly analysis of military politics, and offers insufficient evidence to demonstrate the validity of its thesis.
