The Erosion of Military Prerogatives: The Cases of Peru and Colombia

Abstract

In the cases of Peru and Colombia, civilian authorities have not only avoided military coups in the 1990s and 2000s, but also have made progress in managing the size of defense budgets, influencing military promotions, and playing a greater role in directing security policy. Civilian appointees have headed defense ministries and intelligence services, and prerogatives over military training and budgets have been eroded by civilian authorities. The reduction in military prerogatives coincided with the coming to power of neoliberal policy coalitions that maintained power and pursued economic reform in a region that increasingly has been shifting away from market solutions to development. This has been accomplished despite the existence of internal armed threats to state authority and stability from guerrilla armies such as the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarios de Colombia (FARC) in Colombia and the Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) in Peru. By the end of the 1990s the Shining Path had been substantially weakened from its peak of approximately 10,000 guerrillas, but in 2008–9 there was evidence of a resurgence of the group as they engaged in weekly ambushes on army/police patrols operating in the Apurimac Valley and attacks that led to the deaths of 22 soldiers during 2008 (The Canadian Press 2008; Romero 2009).

Demagogues at the service of terrorism, who, like cowards, wave the banner of human rights in an attempt to bring terrorism back into spaces from which the armed forces and the public have expelled it. Every time a security policy aimed at defeating terrorism appears in Colombia, every time the terrorists start to feel weak, they send their mouthpieces to talk about human rights.

—Colombian president Álvaro Uribe providing his opinion of human rights organizations while speaking at a military ceremony on September 8, 2003

We know that the terrorists and their front organizations, or useful idiots, will not give up and will use all possible resources to harm the image of Peru by alleging that the Peruvian armed forces systematically violate human rights.

—Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori while speaking at a military ceremony on September 24, 1991.¹