Between National Security and New Roles: The Latin American Armed Forces as a Political Actor

Abstract

Many countries in Latin America have opted to assign military personnel to internal tasks. Although this "militarized" response is deeply rooted in the region's political, military and social history, the military increased their projection to the interior of their national territories under the common influence of the United States' strategic concept of National Security since 1947. Defining National Security involves numerous risks since the concept has a great semantic plasticity and makes it difficult to understand the region's constitutional and institutional framework in which police and military forces interact in the so-called Internal Security, which also lead to rethinking civil-military relations in Latin America.