Document created: 30 September 03
Air University Review,
July-August 1974
In past years, few scholars and commentators in this country paid much genuine attention to study of the Latin American military. This was not because the historical significance of the armed forces as a group was unappreciated; it was because they were a known quantity and could be used as a constant in political equations. With one or two explainable exceptions, they were the regrettable by-product of struggles for liberation, allies of the oligarchy, conservative or reactionary, anachronisms in their asserted role as national defenders, and—above all—obstacles to needed progress.
One course in Latin American history or the reading of a few Senate committee hearings on the Foreign Assistance Act was enough to give one the essential idea—a Herblock-like cartoon of a bemedaled pomposity walking with boots and spurs across the backs of peons. Time was better spent, if one chose to study Latin America, investigating the more progressive forces at work or gathering evidence of U.S. neocolonialism.
To be fair, there have been conservative stereotypes as well, in which the
Latin American military appear as good old boys, fellow defenders against the
Red Menace, and friends of the foreign investor. Academic blessings for such
concepts, however, have been slender in this age of “liberalism” on the campus
and in the foundations.1
These contrasting views traditionally have clashed in the operative areas of economic and military assistance, weapon sales policies, and the maintenance of U.S. military missions. Those who view the military as an obsolete burden naturally have pressed for all possible disassociation. The supporters of military assistance programs (MAP) have insisted, at least since 1960, that the programs are essential to help maintain orderly conditions required for economic progress and to keep up advantageous contacts with a powerful political force.
The result of this policy debate over the last decade has been a pronounced
movement toward disassociation and a low U.S. “profile.” Grant materiel
assistance, ended for the “big six” South American countries after 1967, has
shrunk to about $5 million per year. Training programs have been kept level at
around $11 million per year, but they are subject to increasing constraints.2
Legislative ceilings, bans on “sophisticated” weapons and “arms for
dictators,” and last-minute authorizations for the U.S. Foreign Military Sales
(FMS) program have prompted Latin American countries to turn to Europe as their
main source of military purchases. The U.S. military missions, whose history
and functions predate the MAP, have been severely reduced in the interests of
economy and “low profile.” Two countries, Peru and Ecuador, have ousted U.S.
missions, blaming—with evident justification—U.S. efforts to use military
grants and sales as “leverage” in economic and political disputes. Peru is now
purchasing some military equipment, including tanks, from the U.S.S.R.3
Public safety assistance under the Agency for International Development has suffered concurrent retrenchment, amid charges that such aid involved the United States in torture and other repressive acts. Aside from issues over methods or amounts, key Congressional leaders increasingly have challenged the essential thesis that the United States should have any interest in assisting any Latin American government with its problems of internal security. Typical of Congressional criticism is this questioning of then Assistant Secretary of State Charles Meyer by Senator Frank Church during hearings in 1969:
Sen. Church. . . . you refer to “inadequate and inequitable economic social structures which are vulnerable to subversion” as one of the justifications for our counterinsurgency assistance to Latin America. If economic and social structures are inadequate and inequitable, why shouldn’t they be subverted?
Mr. Meyer. I think, Mr. Chairman, it depends on a definition of subversion. I am the first to admit. . . there is a very difficult line to draw between, I would say, positive revolt and total disorder.
Sen. Church. . . . Let me phrase the question a little differently. Do we still believe in the right of revolution?
Mr. Meyer. We do believe in the right of revolution?
Sen. Church. We do believe
in it. That really is our national birthright, isn’t it? Well, I find it very
difficult to reconcile your statement that we continue to believe in the right
of revolution with the thrust of our policy in Latin America.4
Senator William Proxmire expressed similar views in questioning Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird:
Sen. Proxmire. . . . In a letter to Chairman Ellender, dated April 14, 1972, General Seignious stated: “The general rationale for these programs is that although militarily the threat of external attack from outside the hemisphere or Cuba has diminished, the violent extremism remains a disruptive force to economic and social progress with active movements existing in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Uruguay and potential insurgencies in other countries.”
Does that mean that the United States is supporting incumbent regimes in Latin America against purely domestic attack, or even the mere threat of domestic insurgency? Have we used military assistance in such a way that we are deciding who should rule Latin American countries?
Sec. Laird. No, it does not.
Sen. Proxmire. Why, then,
are we providing this assistance?5
Just as this process of disassociation has been running its course, indications have arisen that the academic community in this country might be developing a new and more investigative interest in the political and social role of the Latin American military. The current approaches are sometimes no more objective than the older ones, but at least we are being offered a greater variety of views.
The principal impetus for this, of course, has been the establishment and continuance of a populist, revolutionary military regime in Peru, where the governing junta will fit neither the caudillo nor the “good old boy” mold.
A conspicuous example of this trend toward objectivity is the book, Military Rule in Latin America: Function, Consequences and Perspectives, edited by Philippe C. Schmitter.* Four of this book’s five chapters stem from a seminar held under the auspices of the Center for Policy Study, University of Chicago. Funding was from the Ford Foundation, and publication was under the auspices of a committee that included Morris Janowitz, Charles C. Moskos, Jr., Seymour Melman, and Adam Yarmolinsky. One might expect to read critical viewpoints.
*Philippe C. Schmitter, editor, Military Rule in Latin America: Function, Consequences and Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1973, $12.50 cloth, $7.50 paper), xiii and 322 pages.
The initial chapter, by Alain Rouquié, analyzes the evidence for existence of a “new military.”6 Rouquié is critical enough. In the intensified nationalism of recent military governments—notably in Peru, Bolivia, and Panama—he sees a rejection of the “Pentagon domination” that had tried to reduce Latin American military forces to police work, transforming them from their honorable military role into “forces of control and conservation.” Counterinsurgency thus stands revealed as basically a neocolonialist plot.
Peru is the specimen Rouquié chooses for study. There, he finds, the peculiarities of the Army’s feud with the APRA political party has led to “the presence of a majority of radicalized intellectuals among the professors and civilian collaborators” of the Center of Higher Military Studies (CAEM), which is generally accepted as the fount of social consciousness among the Peruvian military.
Add to the CAEM influence a profound and traumatic distaste for counterinsurgency operations experienced by Peru’s army in campaigns against guerrillas during 1965. Also add a galling resentment of U.S. arms transfer policies that sought to confine Peru’s weapon acquisitions to fit “the subordinate functions which the inter-american division of military labor seemed to assign to it.” Rouquié, who is from France, where the Mirage aircraft is manufactured, considers Peru’s purchase of advanced weaponry from Europe to be deeply significant in turning the military away from its “antisubversive obsession and. . . preservation of the status quo.”
In sum, Rouquié believes the conditions that created Peru’s military revolutionaries are unique, and he finds little evidence that revolutionary trends are as likely in other countries where the military has taken charge—not even in Bolivia or Panama, which he searched as plausible ground. Nor is he persuaded that Peru’s military will stay revolutionary, unless they devise forms of institutionalized contact between leaders and led.
Having so dispatched the pretensions of the “new” military, Schmitter devotes the remainder of his volume to the old. Geoffrey Kemp has a good chapter on the prospects for control of arms transfers in the region. One of its especially valuable contributions is a survey of the external security concerns held by Latin American countries. This may surprise some who have accepted the idea that Latin American countries are not entitled to security concerns because the U.S. supplies a hemispheric shield. It would not surprise anyone who had reflected on the odds that the United States or the Organization of American States would spring to the rescue of any country attacked by its neighbor over some territorial or other issue.
Kemp has also done a thorough job of tracing the limited options available to the United States for discouraging the introduction of “sophisticated” or “excessive” armaments. It is a pity that his realistic views in this area were not impressed upon some U.S. decision-makers before the region became a major market for Mirages and AMX tanks.
The other articles in the Schmitter volume form an interesting exercise in applied political science. The authors have set out to examine what empirical evidence may exist to prove or disprove some of the charges long advanced by critics of the military in Latin America and of U.S. association with them. Do the Latin American armed forces serve oligarchies and impede progress? Does U.S. military assistance encourage coups, stimulate arms races, or create the urge for unnecessary weapons?
The results of efforts to shed the light of modem data analysis on these perennial issues are intriguing. In one of the key chapters, Schmitter expertly massages data for military assistance, GNP, and arms purchases to reach the “inductive inference” that U.S. military assistance generally has raised defense expenditures of Latin American countries. To reach this inference, Schmitter has lumped credit assistance sales (FMS) with grants and surplus items to be considered as total military aid. Now, it seems scarcely worth proving that any country that buys much of its military equipment from the United States will see a correlation between the level of its received “military aid,” so defined, and its total arms spending. Yet, the idea that concomitance—rather than cause and effect—is at work here seems not to have intruded upon Schmitter’s conclusion. This despite his observation later in the piece that there seems to be little correlation between grant aid and total military spending in any country.
In other areas, Schmitter is more cautious. After a detailed analysis of possible correlations between various types of military regimes, the incidence of regime changes, and military spending, he concludes that consistent patterns elude his analytical framework. Work wasted? Not if you compare the results with the usual cliché that “generals get into power and blow the country’s economy on useless weapons.”
All told, the effort in the Schmitter book is an honest and useful one. Perhaps no better evidence could be cited than this remarkable observation by James R. Kurth near the end of the final chapter:
In brief, the comparison of Latin American states for the last decade or so gives little support to the argument that U.S. foreign policies—defined in the strict sense of U.S. military interventions, advisory interventions, military aid, and economic aid—are a major explanation for Latin American military rule. Regretfully, we conclude that a convincing case for the argument has yet to be made. (p. 304).
This is a virtuoso performance in objectivity by Mr. Kurth, who elsewhere in the chapter accepts Schmitter’s generalization on MAP as a cause of arms races and likens U.S. military assistance to one soldier’s participation in a firing squad!
A book of another sort altogether is Miles D. Wolpin’s Military Aid and
Counterrevolution in the Third World.* Mr. Wolpin is a no-holds-barred
critic of U.S. military assistance and military presence abroad, and he has
written this volume in the obvious hope of giving these practices a good
shellacking. Anyone interested in our military assistance policies should read
the book, which Mr. Wolpin has prepared in scholarly style (if not scholarly
spirit). There are abundant citations to sources, with emphasis on hostile
witnesses before Congressional hearings and the works of committed
antiestablishment critics such as John Gerassi, James Petras, Edwin Lieuwen,
and Maurice Zeitlin. To this Mr. Wolpin adds his own experience as a Ford
Foundation researcher in Chile during the ambassadorship of Ralph Dungan (who,
appropriately, must be reckoned about as hostile toward the military as any
U.S. representative to Latin America in our time). 7
*Miles D. Wolpin, Military Aid and Counterrevolution in the Third World (Lexington: Lexington Books, 1972, $12.50), 327 pages.
The book is a handy, one-volume guide to most of the charges, slanderous and real, that critics aim at MAP, from its “neocolonial” purposes and anticommunist inspiration through its inept and intellectually stunted practitioners, to its unresponsiveness to State and embassy direction (and, of course, “presumable” association with CIA), and to its role in fostering arms sales.
One soon appreciates that any success MAP has had in helping Latin American governments (civil or military) to preserve order and put down insurgency is but a source of ire for Wolpin, and it is important that anyone working in military assistance understand that reaction. For example, he terms as “paranoid apprehension of social revolution” the following quotation from General George R. Mather (former USCINCSO) before a House subcommittee:
What worries me about
revolutions, is the attendant risk of chaos and anarchy, because I know there
is a Communist presence in all of these countries which can take advantage of
those conditions.8
It should be noted that General Mather, taken in context, was not talking about nice, social revolution; he was talking about the assassination, arson, riot, and ambush type of revolution. “But the meaning of his statement,” says Wolpin, “is that the United States and its dependent elites would have lost assured control of the client state—and herein lies the threat to Washington’s informal empire.”
That’s about enough to connote the flavor, but a further example of Wolpin’s distortion is irresistible. Citing resurgent nationalism as a factor in the decline of U.S. mission activity, he asserts:
Thus Peru’s military seized government office in 1968 and promptly expelled the entire mission of forty-seven officers and enlistees. In order to continue to receive replacements and spare parts, the regime was induced to receive a new seven man mission. But none of the personnel associated with the previous mission were allowed to return! The largely interventionist function of the earlier mission was also reflected by the fact that the drastically reduced mission informed a visiting congressional delegation that it had enough manpower to fulfill most of their public (statutory) duties! (Emphasis supplied; p. 112)
Among other things wrong with that picture is the fact that nearly eight months elapsed between the junta’s coming to power, in October 1968, and the request for departure of the U.S. Military Group (MILGP). The interim had been filled with tensions resulting from Peru’s seizure of the International Petroleum Company and several tuna boats. On 17 May 1969 the United States announced that all FMS sales had been suspended since 14 February. Aside from unfilled orders, this was the first notification to the government of Peru. The cessation of FMS was cited by Peru’s Prime Minister Montagne Sanchez five days later as the reason for requesting MILGP withdrawal (by 1 July 1969). 9 Relations between the MILGP and their Peruvian military contacts had remained cordial through all this, but it would have been manifestly inappropriate, from the Peruvian viewpoint, to expel the MILGP and then accept members from it in the reduced MAAG at the U.S. Embassy. Wolpin’s inference that activities of the MILGP members caused their expulsion is convenient but an unsupportable supposition.
Also reckless (or low cunning) is his implication that any duties beyond “statutory duties” performed by the MILGP must have been “interventionist.” The report of the Congressional delegation to which he refers clearly notes that the only “statutory” duties (i.e., required by U.S. law) involved were to oversee the receipt of some MAP materiel still in the pipeline.10 Apparently all other advisory and assistance duties of the MILGP were, by Wolpin definition, “interventionist.”
Read the book, if you can find it in a library and don’t have to buy it!
More perceptive challenges to the premises supporting military assistance to Latin America are found in a new book by Luigi Einaudi and several RAND associates, Beyond Cuba: Latin America Takes Charge of Its Future. *
*Luigi Einaudi et al., Beyond Cuba: Latin America Takes Chare of Its Future (New York: Crane, Russak, 1973, $12.50), 250 pages.
Einaudi is a respected student of Latin America’s current political scene, especially known for works on the Peruvian military11 and on U.S. arms transfer policies.12 This book is the culmination of several studies by him and RAND colleagues for the Department of State. Since completing the work, Mr. Einaudi has joined the Planning and Coordinating staff of the Department, where —in keeping with the trend of the times—he will be applying political science directly to the tasks at hand.
An introductory and essential theme of the book, developed in a chapter by Einaudi and David Ronfeldt, is that revolutionary violence and insurgency are not likely to be a serious internal security threat in Latin America at least during the 1970s. There will be no Vietnams to our south, and the Andes will not become a great Sierra Maestra.
“Nonrevolutionary violence” or “domestic political conflict” will continue, in forms such as peasant revolt and rural social banditry, strikes and riots, student rebellions, and assassination or murder of political leaders. Presumably included will be arson and bombing of businesses; the assassination, kidnapping, and extortion of foreign businessmen and diplomats; attacks on police posts and barracks, and so on.
How does one distinguish between revolutionary and nonrevolutionary violence? Possibly by the motives of the perpetrators and the successes of their methods. Thus, there should be some difference in whether an arsonist is a member of a significant revolutionary group or just a free anarchist spirit—and whether his act contributes to the creation of a revolutionary situation that challenges governmental survival. In practice, such distinctions are not always readily apparent.
At any rate, having made their distinction of kind, the authors turn it to challenge a key assumption underlying U.S. security assistance policies: the assumption that domestic political violence is harmful to development efforts and therefore cannot be tolerated. True, they admit, such violence may cause diversion of scarce resources to pay for more security capabilities, may frighten away foreign investors, and may damage fragile political institutions. But there is a good side. It will also spur ruling elites to be more responsive to popular needs and more innovative in their style. Thus:
The Peruvian revolution of 1968 was in part a delayed response to problems highlighted by the 1965 insurgency but left unresolved once the immediate insurgency problem abated. . . . Indeed, even where the violence was considerable, as in Venezuela, the salutary consequences of the government’s responses to insurgency may, over the long run, outweigh the temporary adverse effects. (p. 41)
Threats to U.S. interests, Ronfeldt and Einaudi believe, increasingly will be perceived in the acts of Latin American governments moving to correct, the causes of violence, rather than in revolutionary elements that threaten to take over and do perhaps more of the same thing. Peru is, of course, the archetype, and some form of nationalistic corporatism the likely governmental model.
The issue of whether these governments will be civil or military is overdrawn, writes Mr. Ronfeldt in a chapter devoted to this topic. “The empirically common fact in Latin America is rule by civil-military coalitions, regardless of who formally occupies the chief executive offices.” The continued rise in effectiveness and power of civilian technocrats, the increasing diversity of political leanings among the military, and the common objectives of rapid development and reform all tend to draw compatible military and civilian leaders together to exercise power. Even in “liberal democratic” regimes, Ronfeldt notes, civilian leaders rely on military support for stability. Recent events in Chile and Uruguay have proved how fragile is the structure of democracy above that military support.
Improvements in the economies of most Latin American countries are expected by the contributors to Beyond Cuba. Among the influencing factors will be higher prices in extractive markets, better control over more diversified investments, continued regional cooperation, and government policies conducive to export production.
What happened to the coming demographic disaster? Beyond Cuba is concerned
only with the next ten years, before the flood tide, and population growth
rates “may well not continue unchecked” in any event.13
In international relations, the breakaway from identification with U.S. policies is expected to continue. Trade associations with Europe and the Orient, continued difficulties over the U.S. fishing rights and investments, and the end of Cold War diplomacy will all contribute—along with the psychological incentive to demonstrate independence as a feature of nationalism.
In sum, Beyond Cuba forecasts a Latin America for at least a decade thriving in benign Yanqui neglect, coping successfully, if sometimes turbulently, with problems of security and development, adapting its traditional forms to new conditions, and assuming a more independent status in a multipolar world.
Is U.S. military “assistance” an anachronistic concept for a region with these characteristics? Einaudi believes that it is, and he suggests that, in the military sphere, the United States should “cooperate on a technical and quasi-commercial basis through sales of such equipment and services as the United States makes available elsewhere, but terminating concessional military and police assistance programs.” This prescription accompanies the recommendation:
Economically, to extend nondiscriminatory treatment to Latin America, but otherwise to treat trade and investment as primarily private matters, while seeking to offset major imbalances through multilateral programs and bilateral consultations. (p. 225)
If we can be persuaded, as Einaudi insists, that no Latin American government is going to fall to a leftist rebellion, creating a new locus of hostile power and influence in the hemisphere, what interests of the United States are served by money spent on security assistance there? Or, to put the question more in terms of Mr. Einaudi’s economic recommendation, why should we assist any incumbent government to cope with its internal security problems as a contribution to the conditions for its economic development—if we will not share the burden of responsibility for that development?
These are questions that strike directly at the principal reason advanced for military assistance to Latin America, which is that “Security Assistance furthers economic and social progress by helping to create and maintain a secure environment as well as contributing directly to national development through the various civic action projects it supports.” 14 They are questions that won’t be answered in this brief essay, but a few observations have to be made.
First, Beyond Cuba is a book about “Latin America,” with all the overgeneralization that is implicit in that inescapable term. That means it is principally about the six larger countries of South America. One is easily convinced that these countries can handle their internal security problems without our help (even considering the violence being successfully perpetrated in Argentina today), which is why grant materiel MAP ended for them seven years ago.
The evidence is less convincing that some of the smaller countries will be so successfully independent in their security (or economic) objectives, and this is the reason that the Congress has continued to approve limited funds—most of these to three countries—for MAP materiel in recent years. A program of this magnitude is scarcely potent enough to threaten stifling the “beneficial” effects of “nonrevolutionary” violence, but we have already seen demonstration that a few helicopters and some rations and ammunition can contribute substantially to keeping bounds upon revolutionary disorders in a small country.
The amount of violence thus preserved is little consolation, of course, to the critics who would rather see the revolutionary Left prevail—or to those who would calmly accept that if it is what God wills. Yet, despite Beyond Cuba’s believable forecast that U.S. interests will face increasingly difficult times from Latin American governments, it is certain that these interests would suffer even more from actions by any new governments of the revolutionary Left.
A second reservation: if the United States is going to adjust successfully to a Latin America “in charge of its own future,” we must keep cool and keep communications open. For this reason we should hope that Mr. Einaudi’s recommendation to terminate “concessional” military assistance programs is not applied too literally by policy-makers, even to the larger countries.
Strictly interpreted, this would mean raising interest rates on FMS credit sales to commercial levels, ending MAP-funded training, and recalling MAAG’s and MILGP’s unless the host country absorbed all costs.
FMS credits, direct and guaranteed, are narrowly concessionary (rates must equal those at which the U.S. government borrows), but they are frequently the difference between a decision to purchase from U.S. manufacturers or from European sources, which often are even more attractively subsidized. Enlightened self-interest thus decorates the concessionary aspects of the FMS programs.
The other programs, MAP training and MILGP’s/MAAG’s, are an essential part of security assistance to some of the smaller countries, but other reasons support their continuation for all of the Latin American countries they now serve.
Foremost among other reasons is the fact that the training programs and the missions provide a means of continued contact and rapport with Latin American military leaders, present and future. The term “influence” (even “leverage”) unfortunately has at times been applied to these contacts, providing critics of military assistance with a convenient straw man. (“If you have influence, you must be responsible for coups and expensive arms buys; if you don’t have influence, then the program has failed!”) Considering the limited weight and scope of our current military programs in Latin America, those who expect them to produce “influence” on any specific, significant issue must have a low opinion indeed of the intelligence or integrity of Latin American military officers.
What these direct military contacts do afford is some mutual understanding and respect and, at times, a degree of affinity or tolerance that helps keep communications open and cordial when they might otherwise be closed—or loaded with hostility. The benefits have served U.S. diplomatic efforts on many occasions, as ambassadors have gratefully acknowledged.
Is “concessional” military assistance necessary to preserve these relationships? Einaudi, in another work15 that also deals principally with the larger South American countries, argues that grant materiel assistance should be totally eliminated; yet he favors continuation of the training program, FMS credits, and military missions (again reduced!) as consistent with the current approach of “mature partnership” and mutual respect. Apparently, much depends upon what one calls “concessional.” Perhaps it would be possible to regard our current level of military cooperation with Latin America as a representation effort, rather than as an assistance program.
We might even regard these programs as simply the normal courtesies any major power would be likely to extend to neighboring allied countries with which it wished to maintain amicable relations—someplace between noblesse oblige and cash-on-the barrelhead Yanqui trading.
In this light, Mr. Wolpin’s zealous polemics are largely of historical interest. Military Rule in Latin America is an interesting excursion in technique and a more objective than usual treatment of its topic. Beyond Cuba provides a well-reasoned projection of the circumstances most likely to affect our relations with the Latin American military in the years ahead. Let us hope that Mr. Einaudi’s clear Santa Monica perceptions do not dim in Foggy Bottom.
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Notes
1. The classic objective study (some would call it sympathetic) is John J. Johnson, The Military and Society in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964). For a classic hostile treatment, see several chapters in J. Petras and M. Zeitlin, editors, Latin America: Reform or Revolution (New York: Fawcett, 1968). Balanced assessments of the “new military” are in D. Pollack and A. Ritter, editors, Latin American Prospects for the 1970s: What Kinds of Revolution? (New York: Praeger, 1973) and Charles Corbett, The Latin American Military as a Socio-Political Force (Miami: University of Miami Center for Advanced Political Studies, 1972). The latter book is especially useful in describing the complex political substance that surrounds seemingly simple “military dictatorships.” Robert E. Scott, “National Integration Problems and Military Regimes in Latin America,” views “new military” regimes as perhaps the only route for achievement of urgently needed societal integration in a political and sociological disaster area, in R. E. Scott, editor, Latin American Modernization Problems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973).
2. For example, the “Fulbright provision,” in Sec. 510 of the Foreign Assistance Act, has since 1970 limited foreign military trainees in the United States to numbers not greater than were admitted the previous year under provisions of the Fulbright-Hayes educational and cultural exchange programs.
3. “Soviet Tanks to Peru a Mystery,” Christian Science Monitor, December 17, 1973, p. 1.
4. “United States Military Policies and Programs in Latin America,” Hearings, Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, Committee on Foreign Relations, Senate, 19th Cong., 1st sess., July 8, 1969, p. 65 (hereafter cited as “U.S. Policies and Programs”).
5. “Foreign Assistance and Related Programs Appropriations, Fiscal Year 1973,” Hearings, Committee on Appropriations, Senate, 92d Cong., 2d sess., p.870.
6. Mr. Rouquié’s chapter is a condensation (less material on Bolivia and Panama) of an article originally appearing in Review Française de Science Politique, XXI, 5-6 (October-December 1971), pp. 1045-69, 1234-59. This is the one chapter of the book that did not emanate from the seminar at the University of Chicago.
7. See, for example, his 1969 testimony before Senator Church’s subcommittee in “U.S. policies and Programs,” p. 3ff.
8. Cited by Wolpin (p. 75) from testimony of General Mather in “Foreign Assistance Act of 1969,” Hearings, House, pp. 116, 642-63.
9. A full and accurate account of proceedings that led to the ouster of the MILGP was in the New York Times, May 18, 1969 (18:4), May 21 (17:1), and May 24 (1:5); the last date covers Prime Minister Montagne Sanchez’s announcement of expulsions and the reasons.
10. “Reports of the Special Study Mission to Latin America on I. Military Assistance Training, II. Developmental Television,” House Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Developments, Committee on Foreign Affairs, May 7, 1970, p. 11. This report, of a group headed by Representative Clement Zablocki, also notes cordial relations between Peruvian military leaders and U.S. military personnel and terms the MILGP “a casualty of the dispute” over the IPC issue.
11. See, for example, L. Einaudi and A. Stepan, “Latin American Institutional Development: Changing Military Perspectives in Peru and Brazil,” RAND R-586-DOS, Santa Monica, 1971. Also L. Einaudi, “Revolution from Within? Military Rule in Peru since 1968,” RAND P-4676, Santa Monica, 1971.
12. L. Einaudi, H. Heymann, D. Ronfeldt, C. Sereseres, “Arms Transfers to Latin America: Toward a Policy of Mutual Respect,” RAND R-1173-DOS, 1973 (hereafter cited as “Arms Transfers”).
13. Cited in support is a study by Paul Schultz, “Demographic Conditions of Economic Development in Latin America,” RAND P-3885, Santa Monica, 1968. Schultz accepts more optimistic bases for a downturn in growth rates than most demographers have admitted. Even if one accepts such optimism over the long term, however, it is regrettable that Beyond Cuba does not address the short-term potential for unrest in current population trends that continue to feed barrios, favelas, and other urban slum areas faster than ambitious programs can cope with them.
14. DOD Congressional Presentation Document “Military Assistance Program and Foreign Military Sales, FY-1974” (document classified). This is a revised formulation of the classic rationale advanced in past Presentation Documents: “. . . to help maintain military and paramilitary forces capable of providing, with police forces, the internal security needed to facilitate orderly political, social, and economic development. . . .”
15. “Arms Transfers,” p. 65.
Colonel Harley E. Barnhart (M.A., Stanford University) is Assistant Editor, Air University Review. He was a fighter pilot in World War II, an Air Training Command instructor, and a B-52 commander. His staff assignments include duty with Deputy Directorate of Plans, Hq USAF; with J-5 and Military Assistance directorates of Hq USSOUTHCOM; and as DCS/Plans, Hq Seventh Air Force, Vietnam. He has been faculty adviser and Vice Commander of Air Command and Staff College and is a 1964 graduate of Air War College.
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The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
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