Peace and War in Latin America: Changing Perspectives on Military-Civilian Relations

Conflict In The Southern Cone: The Argentine Military And The Boundary Dispute With Chile, 1870-1902. By George V. Rauch (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999. Pp. 229. $69.50 cloth.)

The Grand Illusion: The Prussianization Of The Chilean Army. By William F. Sater and Holger H. Herwig (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Pp. 247. $50 cloth.)

A War Betwixt Englishmen: Brazil Against Argentina On The River Plate, 1825-1830. By Brian Vale (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. 275. $59.50 cloth.)

The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, And Bolivia In The War Of The Pacific, 1879-1884. By Bruce W. Farcau (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000. Pp. 214. $62.50 cloth.)

La Influencia Del Ejército De Chile En América Latina, 1900-1950. By Roberto Arancibia Clavel (Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios e Investigaciones Militares, 2002. Pp. 537.)

Blood And Debt: War And The Nation-State In Latin America. By Miguel Angel Centeno (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2002. Pp. 329. $45.00 cloth.)

Fear And Memory In The Brazilian Army And Society, 1889-1954. By Shawn C. Smallman (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. 265. $19.95 paper, $49.95 cloth.)

The Paraguayan War: Volume I, Causes And Early Conduct. By Thomas L. Whigham (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Pp. 520. $75.00 cloth.)

Preparado Para La Guerra: Pensamiento Militar Chileno Bajo Influencia Alemana, 1885-1930. By Enrique Brahm García (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2003. Pp. 157.)

Because relations between the state and the military are affected by contemporary global change, rules that determined both civil-military and military-civilian relations since the middle of the seventeenth century may no longer prevail. In what some in the field refer to as the post-modern era of civil-military relations, distinctions between war and peace, and between domestic and international military responsibilities have become increasingly subject to politicization. As a result, opinions of those who once portrayed war in the region as a creator of national identity are subject to revision—perhaps with greater urgency than ever before—in the works discussed herein. As a corpus these works are significant because they raise questions for future students of military-civilian relations.

When it comes to international war, Latin America has had a history more like that of post-colonial Africa than Europe or North America. International peace has been the rule from the Rio Grande south. With the exception of a few conflicts in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth, wars between Latin American countries have been short-lived and rare. The Platine conflicts involving Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay; two wars pitting Chile against Bolivia and Peru; and Mexico's disastrous struggle with its northern neighbor—all in the 1800s—and the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in the 1930s are the only international wars that can seriously be compared to those experienced by Europeans and North Americans over the same span of time.

Conversely, over the past two centuries only the United States and Spain in the Atlantic world have had civil wars comparable in scope and consequence to those endured by Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans (and to those that still torment Africans). Such contrasts and comparisons make this body of work historiographically noteworthy as well.

National identities nurtured on battlefields abound in history. Nowhere has this been more superficially evident than in Latin America. Independence heroes in uniform are common from Mexico to the Southern Cone and are still synonymous with foundational patriotism and national identity. Historians have pointed out their manifest flaws, particularly in recent times, and while they are luminaries, they and their followers did not create many successful post-colonial regimes. Values and priorities of our own times have induced authors to take a hard...