This presentation by the Minister of Defense of the Republic of El Salvador was made on July 7, 2010 at the 6th Sub-Regional Conference for Mesoamerica, held July 20-23 in San Salvador and organized by the Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies (CHDS).
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Military forces in Latin America are being called upon by governments and society to contribute to the fight against non-state armed actors such as criminal gangs, drug traffickers and terrorists. In order to accomplish this task, there is the possibility of actions within the framework of human rights and international humanitarian law. If the armed groups faced by governments meet certain objective characteristics and there is political will, the application of international humanitarian law is viable, as Colombia has demonstrated; the norm is legitimate and facilitates the neutralization and dismantling of the threat.
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Democratic security policy, whose original purpose is to guarantee the security of citizens and the rule of law, institutional order and the strengthening of the state, together with the guarantee of the exercise of democracy through security, has had a notable national, regional and global impact. It has placed the Colombian fight against terrorism on the international stage at many moments and several of its actions have been manifested in international scenarios. The Democratic Security Policy (DSP), implemented since 2003 by President Álvaro Uribe Vélez during his two terms in office, has become the symbol of his administration and the cornerstone of his successes. In the quest to return the country to order and bring security to the Colombian people, it has gone from being a government policy to a pillar of the Colombian State's action and has become an essential element of the Executive, to the point of being one of the common elements of continuity in the proposals of almost all the presidential candidates and of the new government, elected in June 2010.
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The issue of civil-military relations has traditionally addressed, as such, the processes of civil-military relations. But the current context in Latin America demands that we separate these processes and understand their differentiation, incidence and influence. It is in the Ministries of Defense where these processes are best exemplified. In the vertical sense, it is the political-military relationship, as a dimension of power, where politicians must exercise the political leadership of defense and all its implications, and the military, as direct advisors to the subject, and executors of the military policy with political supervision. And civil-military relations, as a horizontal dimension, do not imply any relationship of power, but of knowledge. In some countries where defense communities have been created, they can be a space for consultation on this policy and other issues of interest to defense and military affairs.
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The incorporation of women into terrorist groups has occurred in disparate ways and with commitments characterized by gradual rhythms. This paper approaches the problem heuristically from a culturalist perspective, which has as its explanatory axis the male-female relationship. It is found that women leaders of terrorist organizations, or protagonists of emblematic acts, are rather a rarity, except in the Salvadoran and German experiences; both with quasi-epic connotations. Among the explanatory keys, the environmental influence of the machismo of the time is proposed, especially in Latin America, and reflected both in the very beginnings of the Cuban guerrillas and later in the various insurrectional pockets. The environmental influence would act as a major inhibiting factor. At the same time, the proletarian internationalism that was the basis for the proliferation of such groups seems to have been, at its core, a male thing. There is no record of women (not even Cuban) fighting alongside the mythical Ché in Bolivia; nor is there any record of any revolutionary leader accompanying Guevara in his previous journeys to the Congo, Algeria and others. A second major finding aims at explaining the irruption of women as suicide bombers as a product for communicational consumption. The crudeness of this incorporation of women into the great Chechen and Palestinian terrorist causes is rather frightening and raises a very pertinent doubt as to whether this phase responds to a construct or to a reliable integration into the cause they appear to embrace.
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The next three decades will witness the most important geopolitical change of the last few centuries: the rise of Asian power and the restructuring of the system of international relations. This paper aims to show how, why and with what consequences a progressive transfer of influence and a shift of power centers towards the region is already taking place. In order to analyze this, the reasons behind the rise of the Asian group on the global scene and the structural changes brought about by its incorporation will be pointed out; the main instruments of projection towards the rest of the world will be studied and, in more detail, the strategic repercussions for the Americas of the emergence of a new system of international relations, the Eastphalian system, will be discussed.
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Two events in 2008 brought about substantial changes in the international system: the Russian invasion of Georgia and the international financial crisis, both of which highlighted the powerlessness of international institutions to deal with such events. The war in Georgia made it clear that unilateral US measures, including an American deployment in traditionally Russian zones of influence, revitalized the country's relations with the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, in order to propose a regional vision on international security issues. On the other hand, the financial crisis originating in the United States has had repercussions on the world economy, causing, among other things, the volatility of international commodity prices and the retraction of investments in emerging economies. Governments are trying to apply corrective measures ad intra while seeking, externally, to create conditions to stabilize the financial situation from a cooperative perspective. In this context, American hegemony without the multilateralist complement, which means having international legitimacy, is an invitation to generate strategic counterweights. From the perspective of critical realism of geostrategic unilateralism, such as that of the Iraq war, could argue that if the world is to be governed, multilateralism is the way to go.
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In South America, attempts to establish a new institutional framework for intelligence are constantly being made. Probably together with the serious shortcomings of the police forces, the structuring of professional intelligence services is one of the pending issues in the democratic consolidation of security in the region. Most of these organizations are headed by military and police officers, although the number of civilian employees is increasing. Two very different groups of countries can be identified. On the one hand, there are those with old and consolidated organizations, at least in appearance, although not necessarily legitimized (SIDE in Argentina, ABIN in Brazil and DAS in Colombia). On the other hand, there are a number of countries with intelligence services in gestation and in search of legitimacy and professionalism. This is the case of ANI in Chile and DINI in Peru, while the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela are trying to establish, through legislative reforms, completely new intelligence organizations. In any case, the lack of professionalism, the use of bad practices -- often through the political use of the services, and, in some cases, the low level of efficiency and success, as well as the persistence of internal struggles for power, influence and resources among civilians, military and police -- persist.
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This article seeks to analyze the frameworks and forms of cooperation between military and police forces in a contemporary world characterized by a growing militarization of the field of public security. The correlation between military and police has not only occurred in peace-building missions under the baton of multilateral organizations such as the UN and NATO, but also in the fight against organized crime, illegal trafficking, insurgency and terrorism that have intermingled, forcing governments to provide coordinated interagency responses, which has led to a blurring of the boundary between plain defense and pure citizen security. This proposal analyzes these two variants of police-military cooperation and coordination. Despite differences in ethos, culture, missions and firepower, the combined actions of both bodies have been essential to reestablish, first, the rule of law and institutional reconstruction and, second, to confront new threats to national security. However, little is known about combined military-police actions in Latin America against terrorism and drug trafficking. This project seeks to delve in detail into the latter aspect.
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