“Military regimes in Latin America,” Karen Remmer observes, “have modified electoral loyalties, restructured political cleavages, and contributed to the rise of new political forces” (p. 73). Thus, though the officers are back in their barracks and throughout Latin America military rule appears profoundly discredited, much remains to be learned. Analysis of the phenomenon of military rule paralleled its very development, often with little historical perspective. It is important that now, with democratization the watchword, scholars not forget about the military. These two books, which combine research on the armed forces with that on regime change, provide much material to ponder.
Remmer offers a valuable comparative discussion of military rule before focusing on the Pinochet regime as a case study. She emphasizes that exclusionary military regimes have been “the single most prevalent form of political domination in Latin America since World War II” (p.20), while Augusto Varas warns that the armed forces “will retain a considerable share of political power. . .” and will likely not be contented “with the roles they played before becoming so deeply involved in politics” (p. 1). He and his colleagues, all of whom are from the region, examine the relationships between democratization and military reform in Colombia and Ecuador (Fernando Bustamante), Peru (Marcial Rubio Correa), Argentina (Varas), Brazil (Eliézer Rizzo de Oliveira), Chile (Felipe Agüero), Uruguay (Juan Rial), Mexico (José Luis Piñeyro), Cuba and Nicaragua (Raúl Benitez Manaut, Lucrecia Lozano, Ricardo Córdova, Antonio Cavalla), Central America (Gabriel Aguilera), and Bolivia (Raúl Barrios). Both books tell a good deal about the reciprocal effects of military rule on political and military institutions.
Together they provide a starting point for the response scholars must make to Remmer’s criticism that research has tended to “emphasize regime transitions and neglect the comparative analysis of military rule” (p. 25). She notes that Guillermo O’Donnell and Alfred Stepan focused on the origins of military rule as if the ways the military came to power provided the principal explanations of subsequent developments. She makes a strong case that “the forces that shape authoritarian rule are not fixed at the time of regime emergence” (p.31). She stresses that a weakness of comparative analysis has been that it has dealt more with similarities than differences, and that it is the latter that “are likely to create important contrasts among military regimes” (p.33). It is encouraging to find a political scientist arguing for the importance of history!
Remmer’s view is that redemocratization is more than the breakdown of authoritarian rule, and that “in every Latin American case” the rules of politics “changed in response to conflicts and compromises among groups struggling both for and against the restoration of democracy” (p.67). Nowhere in the region was the process a case of returning to the status quo ante. Military rule promoted political change rather than freezing previous patterns.
In a particularly useful chapter, Remmer examines the economic impact of military rule. Observing that Latin Americanists have accepted as conventional wisdom the proposition that “authoritarianism is a prerequisite for successful economic stabilization” (p.79), she concludes from the “comparative evidence” (p.78) that military regimes do not produce better economic growth than competitive ones; their seeming success is rather a product of regime change. When political and economic crises coincided, they created “exceptional space” in which the new actors could undertake different solutions from those available to their predecessors (p. 106).
The message of Varas’ book is that protection of national interests masks preservation and enhancement of the military’s own institutional interests. Collectively the authors point to the military’s autonomy as a characteristic weakness in Latin American political systems. Observing that military officers’ involvement in politics and repression “did not lead to a decline in their professionalism,” Varas concludes that the interventions showed the military’s “ability to sustain increasing political autonomy without sacrificing rapid modernization or professional standards.” And, if this tendency continues unchecked, he fears that redemocratization will lead to “new state forms, different from traditional Western democratic ones” (p.12).
These books remind us that democratic government is indeed fragile. They are stimulating contributions to the literature on the military in Latin America.
