On February 29, 2004, only ten years after the United States last intervened in Haiti to reinstall President Jean Bertrand Aristide, U.S. military forces once again entered Haiti to stabilize the country after President Aristide fled as violence gripped the country. However, unlike the 20,000 troops, significant resources, and ambitious objectives of Operation Uphold Democracy in 1994, the recent intervention was executed with a much smaller force, with much more limited United States government goals, objectives, and expectations. This paper will analyze the events leading to the U.S. decision to intervene and the rationale to limit US objectives and participation. It will then examine the planning, organization, objectives, and effectiveness of the Multinational Interim Force’s (MIF) and the transfer of responsibility to the UN stabilization force. The paper will conclude with recommendations on how the US may build upon and strengthen the demonstrated capacity for collective security operations for Latin America and the Caribbean in the future.
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This paper serves to introduce the Special Edition of Security and Defense Studies Review. It discusses the nature of the research project on Capacity Building in Latin America and the Caribbean: PKO and the Case of Haiti. The paper develops the hypotheses, research questions, and the methodology of the study. Finally, an appendix, provides a list of the nine research questions and their subordinate questions.
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The text summarizes the review of research on education in the Brazilian Navy, focusing on the Course on Maritime Policy and Strategies (C-PEM). Some of the key arguments regarding the current world military profession and education are introduced as well as their effects on the Brazilian situation. Finally, some considerations are presented on the current organization of the course, within the context of changes in homeland defense, highlighting some political-educational aspects of the relationship with Brazilian society.
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The isolation of the Falklands-Malvinas from the American continent is a strange and awkward contradiction within the new paradigms of globalization. Moreover, the liberal civil rights enjoyed by the inhabitants of the Falklands-Malvinas Islands clashes with their legal framework of discrimination applied to outsiders, and both factors can only result in a resurgence of tension and an increase in the cost of the conflict. The goal of this presentation is to encourage a change in attitude by the parties involved in the dispute, through an analysis of the historical decision-making process and the opportunities associated with the controversy. However, a change in attitude alone is not enough for an effective solution to this territorial dispute. It requires an Argentina with reliable institutions in parallel with the United Kingdom’s political will. Finally, there are some valuable lessons we can learn from the narrative. Perhaps an early attempt to craft a solution to this dispute might be possible by taking into account the Henry Kissinger’s words of wisdom, when he stated that "a successful negotiation happens when both sides lose something."
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The article has two goals: first, to show how Brazil, when compared to other Latin American countries, represents a successful case of incorporating the military into the new democratic order; and second, to demonstrate that part of this process of subordinating the military to civilian power – and the consequent redefinition of civilian-military relations – can be credited to the way in which Brazil conceived and negotiated political amnesty during the transition to civilian rule. In addition, it will be argued that this success can also be explained by the ways in which the democratically elected governments of the 1990s dealt, in name of the State, with persisting uncertainties about "past scores to be settled."
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Departing from a series of concepts referred to as "the bankruptcy of the States", a perspective taken from Frenchman Philippe Delmas (1992), the author confronts the concepts of lawless areas and empty spaces, stating that they obey two different models of States, that is, unsuccessful States and weak States. Examining the bibliography, Garay discusses the autonomy of the weak states/empty spaces relationship from the unsuccessful states/ lawless areas pair, then applies them to the analysis of Latin America. Under the author’s supposition, the austral zones of Chile and Argentina can be analyzed using the weak states/empty spaces concept rather than the concept of unsuccessful states/lawless areas. An empirical examination permits us to postulate that empty spaces are conflicted spaces for human presence, which weakens the presence of the state, and given that the resources of the aforementioned states are scarce, that which is produced is a presence that is weakened from the police system, but not by the absence of law, which is why it would not be pertinent to extend this typology to the Southern Cone, as is normally done when analyzing the Tri-Border area.
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This paper reviews the relationship between Defense and the federal public budget, with the objective of checking compliance with formally stated goals. In spite of its relevance, the Brazilian public budget gives more emphasis to financial information, to the detriment of operational or strategic information. Nevertheless, the public budget does allow the observation of certain occurrences. Defense and supply are disconnected, the latter characterized as an expense element. Defense-related programs were not regarded as strategic in the multi-annual plan, in force in 2001. Moreover, in the corresponding multi-annual plan there is an apparent overlap between the activities of each branch of service, and there is no special reference to defense-related diplomatic activities or intelligence. There is also some evidence of rescheduling of the 2001 budget elements, while maintaining values within additional limitations. The most serious discrepancy is in the lack of association between diplomatic relations and the national defense function, without any evidence of budget values in the attached detailed report, despite policy and legal direction. These issues point out subjects that should be given more attention by national planning and control in Brazil.
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This paper focused on the origin, structure and roles of the military of Belize, an arm of the state of the only English-speaking country in Central America. The key tasks that were undertaken by the Belize’s military were both external and internal. It is shown that Belize is the only country of the English-speaking Caribbean in which armed forces are used primarily for defense. This is so to deter the Guatemalan army from marching into Belize and to control the infiltration of its borders by illegal immigrants. However, Belize’s military has become increasingly involved in "police" operations, including the combating of drugs and maintaining domestic order, thus leading to a blurring of the roles of the police and the military, as well as the provision of relief during natural and other disasters. Finally, Belize’s military engaged in self-help programs and provided assistance to a number of civilian projects as a way of fostering improved civil-military relations.
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The article was written by one of the individuals directly involved in drawing up the 1995 Framework Treaty on Democratic Security in Central America and in its enforcement, who was a main player in the historic circumstances that led to this treaty. The article is primarily intended to show the contribution made by this ambitious instrument to the new multidimensional model of hemispheric security that the Organization of American States (OAS) has been developing and which was successfully expressed in the OAS Special Conference on Security, held in Mexico City, Mexico on October 27-28, 2003, where this contribution made by Central America was widely recognized.
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