The types of violent conflicts occurring more frequently today encompass solutions from different areas, making participation in peacebuilding from a broad range of backgrounds and specializations essential to its success. In order to reinforce the internal structure of fragile or destroyed states, it is necessary to achieve a stronger integration and coordination not only among the States but also among the international organizations. Peacekeeping must become Peacebuilding to accomplish this end. Integral security has long been a basic concept for all the participating countries. International experience demonstrates that States who cooperate in a specific country for humanitarian reasons and under UN mandate should afterwards complement the peace operations carried out by military forces with actions designed to settle that country's basic needs. As a concept, peace operations is broader, representing much more than sending troops. Along with the mission of enforcing peace and security, it also has a wider and more integral multidisciplinary character, throwing down a gauntlet to both civilian and military people to act jointly and in coordination in various multiple and complex tasks. This is necessary so that the new operations achieve their final goal of securing peace and socio economic development. In this article the case of Chile's evolution is presented inside the peace operations under the UN mandate. The future participation of civilians as a whole, altogether with military and police, is presented as another topic of the Foreign Policy under the framework of the Chilean International Cooperation Agenda for Haiti. Also, the Parliament's involvement in the generation of national strategic planning capabilities for peacebuilding is highlighted.
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Scholars have analyzed participation by civilians in defense ministries in Latin America from a dual perspective: as part of a civilian-military integration and as an instrument of civilian control of the sector. These practices have been adopted in a context of democratic consolidation and, in the governmental sphere, of a demand for rationalization and greater efficiency and effectiveness in the conduct of government. The case of Chile is a good example of this. Since the restoration of democracy (1990), the inclusion of civilians in the Ministry has been a constant. All of the ministers have been civilians, as have all undersecretaries; however, because the Ministry does not have a permanent staff of civilian professionals, an Advisory Committee has gradually and inorganically developed within the Ministry, which brings in people who provide advisory services on political, politico-strategic, budgetary, international, communications and auditing issues.
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This presentation addresses the subject of the war against terrorism and the implication that the Armed Forces in it is a topic that is itself polemic. However, it is possible to argue in favor of a moderate and contained insertion from a theoretical basis that, departing from M. Creveld and M. Kaldor in terms of the new types of armed violence, suggests that the concept of war can be applied post- September 11 to a series of conflicts that were being profiled from before that event, linked to large-scale political violence. It is a subject of defense entities inasmuch as it influences or disrupts security, but it has fewer armed implications under conditions of institutional stability if the action concentrates on the nature of the economic action that supports terrorist and criminal activities. The author postulates that weak states can define a supranational strategy that will coordinate and produce a strangulation of illegal funding sources, given that the illegal financing circuits are the same for terrorism as for transnational organized crime, which are not certainly the same thing, but represent threats of new nature for the region's states.
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An analysis and discussion of the struggles and demands of indigenous peoples for autonomy, in the countries of Latin America, must rise above predictions of disaster. It must avoid the chronic temptation to classify this influential trend as a potential threat to nationhood that must be addressed decisively by reducing or eliminating the demand. The present work discusses a potential future crisis between Chile and Argentina if the Mapuche demand for one people, one territory becomes established and develops forcefully on both sides of the Andes. What is known as the Mapuche Conflict could become a bi-national variable. It must be recalled that this area contains significant numbers of Mapuche communities on both sides of the Andean range. If it intensifies, the actors in the crisis, in addition to the Mapuche, will be two states with not a few disputes in their history since independence from Spain. We still have unresolved border issues and other significant, and recently expressed, misunderstandings and differences of a serious tone. In the event of a nationalistic-type Mapuche Conflict, these differences could lead to a crisis in border relations in which the two sides could find themselves in highly disparate positions regarding the "what," "how," and "when" to do and in benefit of whom to act, as occurred and continues to occur in many other matters, including indigenous issues, beginning with ILO Convention 169 that Argentina signed six years ago and Chile has refused to sign.
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