The answer is complicated by the fact that most South American countries have minimal need for military forces as they are historically used, in warfare and foreign deployments. In most countries around the world, the purpose of the military is to protect the homeland from foreign threats or to protect the nation’s interests abroad. But due to the rugged terrain in much of South America, interstate warfare is rare and difficult to carry out, especially compared to other regions like Europe. The continent’s location in the Southern Hemisphere means it also faces minimal military threats from outside the continent. These countries still need to defend themselves, of course, but the threats they face often come from domestic actors or foreign elements that have already infiltrated the country. They primarily include non-state actors, such as organized crime groups that can operate across borders and rely on cooperation from local organizations for daily operations like crop cultivation, drug production and trafficking. Local police forces are ill-equipped to handle such threats, and even national police forces can be ineffective. Given these constraints, the idea of relying on the military, which is often better trained and funded than police forces, to defend against these threats sounds reasonable. This puts the government and military in a bit of a predicament. On the one hand, many of these governments want to find a way to effectively use the military and to modernize relations with the armed forces. On the other hand, the public and the governments themselves are wary of the military’s involvement in domestic affairs.
Chile’s military modernization efforts come at a time when the institution is going through a sort of transition. The first post-Pinochet generation is now rising in the upper ranks of the armed forces. Nearly all of the country’s current top brass – rear admirals and brigadier generals – started their careers toward the end of the Pinochet regime and will be retiring in the next few years, so the ideas and practices of that era will be eliminated. The modernization efforts will be focused on professionalizing the military and changing its funding structure. Until July, for example, the military had received a cut of the profits from state-owned copper company Codelco. After years of debate, Chile finally passed a law ending this financing. Other countries in the region are also going through changes in relations between the government and military, particularly with respect to operations. Peru is a major location for cocaine production and the main groups in control of drug activities have past links with insurgent groups. The government now uses the military to crack down on narco-terrorists. Argentina is not a producing country, but rather a transit country. As such, the government is starting to experiment with using the military to support the gendarmerie in securing the country’s borders, primarily from drug organizations. In Brazil, the military has recently been used to help control the country’s vast territory and increase government presence in some of its more far-flung regions. It supported anti-drug operations in Rio de Janeiro in 2018, helped manage the influx of Venezuelan migrants into Roraima and helped contain the fires in the Amazon this past summer. In all of these cases, the governments are looking to the armed forces to help solve security problems that arguably fall outside the traditional role of the armed forces, which includes fighting wars and dealing with foreign threats.
Chile’s recent bout of unrest appears to be declining, but the changes Pinera introduced this week address only the economic grievances of the protesters, while the underlying question of the role of the country’s armed forces remains unanswered. Pinera raised the basic pension by 20 percent, backpedaled on a 9.2 percent hike in electricity tariffs, increased the minimum wage, introduced more taxes on high-income earners and introduced measures to improve the accessibility of health care and medicine. And yet, he didn’t pull back security forces, saying he needed to guarantee that the country remains peaceful. Chile, like many in the region, doesn’t have a clear vision of what role its armed forces should play. So, it uses an ad hoc approach, deploying troops when the government deems it necessary. It may develop a clearer path forward in the future, but for now, we have only a vague indication of what that might look like.
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