This study of civil-military relations in Colombia is an excellent contribution to the literature on the political role of the Latin American armed forces. Although it covers the entire period since independence, it stresses the period from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The Colombian case is unusual in that the proper analytical focus for national politics is the dominance of civilian political elites—the Conservative and Liberal parties—which controlled politics throughout the first century after independence.
In the early nineteenth century, according to the author, the Colombian army was poorly trained and equipped, the victim of patronage politics and nepotism. The numerous “generals” were in no sense professional military commanders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, various efforts were made to professionalize the army by forming military schools and contracting foreign military advisers. Nevertheless, the army basically served the partisan interests of the civilian political class and military factions lined up with the two parties in their destructive civil wars, the bloodiest being the Thousand Days War of 1899-1902.
Although technical military professionalization advanced slowly and steadily, the professionalizing impulse was hampered by the continuation of officers’ subservience to the two ruling parties. As new and more radical social forces emerged, beginning in the 1920s, the military responded with an ever-stauncher defense of the political and social status quo; in no sense were they depoliticized. In the 1940s and 1950s, however, three events reshaped the thinking of the Colombian officer corps: la Violencia and the birth of irregular armed groups and guerrilla organizations, the army’s participation in the Korean War, and the presidential regime of General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. These developments led to increasing institutional autonomy for the armed forces and to a strong anti-Communism, focused at first on the external enemy (Korea) and subsequently on the internal enemy, as manifest in various radical guerrilla factions.
The latter part of the book analyzes military behavior since the formation of the National Front in 1958, a complex period in Colombian politics and civil-military relations. Among other factors, the diminution of interparty conflict led the military to further increase its institutional autonomy, forging closer ties to other Latin American military establishments and drawing itself more tightly into U.S. hemispheric policy and military objectives.
In the 1980s, civil-military relations continued to be complicated by linkages between various military factions and powerful economic groups and by the unacceptably high level of violence associated both with continuing guerrilla activities and international drug trafficking. In such a disturbing setting, it is unclear to the author how civil-military relations could be “fixed” to make a legitimate democracy in Colombia sustainable. Such a solution has so far escaped the best minds of Colombia. The author, nevertheless, has done an admirable job in skillfully and dispassionately tracing the politicomilitary background to the current troubled situation.
