Despite the title, this book is primarily concerned with the political role of the military in Latin America. Curiously, it resurrects the old myth of military salvation for the area. The author, earlier in his career a severe critic of that myth, emerges in this work as an enthusiastic perpetrator of it.
Adopting C. Wright Mills’s classification of the determinants of state power, Horowitz sees economic forces (industrial capitalism) dominant in the First World, political forces (the Communist party) in the Second World, and military forces in the Third World. He identifies three principal theories of Latin American militarism. The modernization theorists (Rostow, Hoselitz, Shils), who view military rulers as transitional agents in breaking down the traditional order and ultimately ushering in an era of democratic capitalism, he views as old-fashioned, out-of-date. The dependency theorists (Wallerstein, Baran, Dale Johnson), who view the military as agents for imperialist forces, he rejects as going beyond the hard evidence. It is with the developmental theorists (Huntington, Furtado, Dumont), who view the military as an autonomous nationalistic force emerging in reaction to external pressure and to the socioeconomic demands of the domestic growth process, that the author identifies.
He warns those scholars who deign to differ with him: “Those who assert that the Third World is simply on a developmental path toward modernization in accord with the First World or socialization in accord with the Second World are badly mistaken on empirical grounds and sadly misinformed on intellectual and moral grounds” (p. ix). He insists that the new military rulers have made Latin America increasingly independent of external controls: “the higher the degree of military authority, the lesser … the extent of foreign influence and domination” (p. 97). This unsubstantiated conclusion is refuted in Guillermo O’Donnell’s Bureaucratic Authoritarianism, which clearly demonstrates that the new Latin American militarism (in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay) is a coalition of military officers, bureaucratic technicians, transnationalized bourgeoisie, and external capitalist forces. Equally dubious is the author’s attempt to refute the dependency thesis mainly on the grounds that declining United States military programs have coincided with increasing military rule in Latin America. This narrow view of the problem ignores the comprehensive orchestration of United States foreign policy inputs, including public and private economic pressures, media controls, psychological warfare, and covert actions of the CIA. To deem such policy action irrelevant to the military take-overs in Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1973 is to overlook hard evidence to the contrary.
This reviewer has no quarrel with the Horowitz view that military rule is partly a consequence of economic breakdown, social cleavage, and political chaos resulting from the excesses of populist civilian governments. Harder to accept is his assertion that the military is without significant “class connection or ideological persuasion” (p. 101), or that “overt military rule in one nation after another in Latin America is a function of the general law of statism: the increase of centralized power at the expense of separatist class, racial, and religious interest” (p. 143). Even harder to swallow are the automatic benefits that Horowitz sees emerging from the militarization process: steady economic growth, benign social integration, and, ultimately, even political democracy. Impossible to accept is his grim prediction for Latin America for the remainder of the century: permanent and ever-expanding military rule. Where the military does not already rule overtly, Horowitz proclaims it a covert power-holder and policy-making partner in Mexico, Peru, Cuba, Colombia, and Venezuela—a doubtful conclusion for which no evidence is supplied. With respect to his thesis of expanding militarism, the experience of the past half decade is to the contrary. The power and credibility of the military regimes in Argentina and Uruguay appear to be waning. A combination of ineptness and corruption brought the military regimes to an end in Ecuador in 1979 and Peru in 1980. Nicaragua rid itself of a military dictatorship in 1979 and El Salvador finally got a civilian government in 1982. In fact, nowhere in Latin America has military rule been expanded since 1976.
