THIS VOLUME is concerned with the development of the military of Latin America, past, present, and future. More especially, it discusses the role played by the elites of the armed forces when, on their own initiative or at the urging of politicians, they have behaved in an extra-military manner. The study examines the methods available to officers to influence policy decisions, when they are not in direct control of governments as well as when they are. It also treats at length the impact that officers have in the social-economic area. Particular attention is paid to the social-economic background of the officers, because until the services become considerably more professional, officers will often make decisions on the basis of their personal rather than their institutional experiences. Army officers are studied in greater depth than naval and air force officers because armies have ordinarily been more capable of imposing their will upon society, which has given greater potential power to army leaders. This emphasis seemed warranted despite the fact that quite recently the air forces of Ecuador, Venezuela, and Guatemala and the navies of Argentina, Peru, and Venezuela have shown an increasing disposition to challenge army dominance. Also, Spanish America and Brazil and the armed forces in the respective areas have developed in such different ways that it appeared advisable to deal with them separately.

Several concepts and themes emerge from this study. One of the more important ones is that Latin American officers are first and foremost the products of their environments; this should become apparent in those sections of the chapter on Brazil in which the evolution of the military in Spanish and Portuguese America is compared. Another concept with important implications is that in Latin America officers historically have tended to follow instead of lead, which distinguishes them from their counterparts in the new nations of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. But change, constant and profound, both in society and in the military, is the principal theme of the volume. If there is a message, it is that the attitude of the officers toward change and toward emerging groups, rather than toward force and violence and the size of military budgets, will ultimately have the greater effect upon Latin America's position in the world.

The research was carried out and the volume written with several basic propositions in mind. First, the societies of the republics vary so greatly in their individual characteristics, their stage of national development, the strength of their institutions, and their ability to resist political, economic, and military pressures from the outside that it would be impossible to set up categories that would capture all of the important nuances of the existing reality. Second, force and violence, with which the military are always associated in one way or another, are still important parts of the political process in most of the republics, and they must be considered as such. Third, the military cannot be judged simply in terms of being for or against democracy, nor can it be assumed that the armed services are static, with fixed approaches to major political and economic problems. Fourth, an emphasis on the role of the military elites—those higher-ranking officers with the most influence—is still warranted, despite the slowly increasing political effectiveness of non-commissioned officers. Finally, it cannot be assumed that the armed forces will withdraw from politics until civilians evolve stable, organized institutions and provide responsible leadership capable of pursuing solutions to the problems of the republics.

A few words about sources and documentation are in order. The background chapters are based entirely upon printed materials and are meant to be representative of the area as a whole. Those parts of the volume dealing with the contemporary scene are based upon printed documents, manuscript materials, and information collected since mid-1960 from interviews with approximately 500 military men and civilians. The printed materials, as in the case of the background chapters, are representative of the literature for the republics in general. The manuscripts used dealt only with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, and Venezuela, and the interviews were carried out in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Venezuela, and the United States. Each person interviewed understood that his anonymity would be respected, and I believe I have kept my word on that score. A vast share of the manuscripts were made available to me by agencies in Latin America and the United States to which attribution cannot be made.

I have in places drawn heavily on literature, folklore, and art to illustrate social attitudes. I undertook the examination of a sizable body of material—approximately one hundred selected novels and anthologies and more than five hundred essays, poems, folk songs, and bits of folk verse, plus at least two thousand paintings in a dozen art museums, and dozens of art volumes and journals—not because I felt I had any particular expertise in analyzing such sources, but because I believed they could be used to add a human dimension to a very human problem.

Finally, it seems advisable to indicate briefly what has not been done in this study, or has been done only incidentally. No attempt has been made to recount the story of the hundreds of successful and unsuccessful coups that have taken place in Latin America since Independence, much less to recall the names of all those who ruled the people because they ruled the armies. This is not a narrative history, but an interpretation, necessarily generalized, of military-civilian relations. The information I collected on the police and national guards has been excluded because it did not seem to affect in any important way the interpretations offered in this volume. The Cuban militia under Castro was not dealt with for a number of reasons, among which the most compelling is that I had never seriously studied the history of the republic before Castro achieved power and have no sources on the Castro era that have not been available to others better qualified to use them. The role of the various military establishments in the defense of the Hemisphere is not discussed because that role seems to me essentially a myth. No attention is given to the policy implications of what emerges from the study, although certain policy decisions would seem to follow logically from the conclusions that are offered. This is a study of the internal history of Latin America, not of foreign relations as they relate to Latin America.

I wish to express my thanks to Mrs. Carolyn Johnson Reese, who assisted me with my research when it was getting under way. I am deeply indebted to Professors Edwin Lieuwen, University of New Mexico, Lyle N. McAlister, University of Florida, Rollie Poppino, University of California at Davis, and Ronald Schneider, Columbia University, and to Robert Dean of the State Department, who read the manuscript and made many valuable suggestions; and also to Professor Robert Potash, of the University of Massachusetts, who generously provided me with information on cliques in the armed forces of Argentina. I especially wish to express my warm appreciation to the many persons in Latin America and in the United States who must remain anonymous but without whose friendly cooperation the volume would have lacked an important dimension.

The Committee on Research in Public Affairs of Stanford University in 1960 awarded me funds for a research assistant. Travel and research in Latin America during 1960 and time off from my regular duties during the academic year 1962-63, when the manuscript was completed, were made possible by grants under the program administered by the Joint Committee on Latin American Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council.

JOHN J. JOHNSON

Stanford University
October 7, 1963