Latin America’s Wars. Vol. 2, The Age of the Professional Soldier, 1900–2001

It is a popular assumption that wars (at least international ones) are rare in Latin America and that professional soldiers (at least officers) spend more time playing at politics than they do making war. This solid companion volume to Latin America’s Wars: The Age of the Caudillos, 1791–1899 makes two major points convincingly. First, Scheina asserts, in the past century, armed conflict was principally a domestic phenomenon: interclass and intraclass struggles, interventions, ideological warfare, terrorism, narcowar, guerrilla, and the like. Second, throughout the twentieth century, military professionals across the region spent as much or more time struggling with varied enemies within than they did actually administering their countries or defending them against their neighbors. Well before the so-called postmodern era, peace and war, and relations between civil and military sectors of society, were miscible in Latin America. Like the caudillos before them, professional soldiers would have both internal and external missions to fulfill in the twentieth century.Beset by multiple limitations, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay struggled to define frontiers in the Andes and the South American heartland, most notably in the 1920s and 1930s. El Salvador and Honduras went at it in 1969, Argentina attempted to take over the Falklands/Malvinas in 1982, and there were frequent border skirmishes and mobilizations throughout the region. These international conflicts rarely settled long-standing grudges, and domestic conflict, interventions, and civil wars did not always lead to desired ends. Military involvements in extraregional, intercontinental, and global affairs did little to resolve any regional problems. Latin America’s wars, Scheina shows, have been more symptomatic than definitional of long-standing cultural, diplomatic, economic, political, and social issues. This made peace and war all the more miscible.Scheina’s taxonomy of Latin American conflicts purposely leads readers to see the region as fraught with complexity, and this is a very good thing if the majority of its recent wars are ever to mean much more to scholars and statesmen than failed international campaigns, frustrated domestic attempts to alter the status quo, or reactions to interventions and manipulations from without—or all of these. Some readers may want to make analogies with West Asia in the post–cold war decades.Scheina’s discussion of the Chaco War of 1932–35 is a case in point. Once condescendingly described by Eurocentrics as “two bald men fighting over a comb,” this binational tragedy exposed Bolivian and Paraguayan realities all too brutally. But only in the Andes did international war prove more than symptomatic of domestic ills. In Bolivia, the international conflict ultimately led the way to the interclass revolution of 1952. In Paraguay, it led to an inconclusive intraclass war, that of 1947. In discussing this conflict, Scheina does an admirable job recalling the most important domestic causes and effects of the region’s only sustained international conflict of the past century. Just like politics, all war is local.Latin America’s Wars is a far cry from traditional military history, because Latin American history is sui generis, and the author knows it. Better and more maps would doubtless complement the solid writing and excellent illustrations, but this cavil does not deter from the book’s value as a contribution to the study of Latin American civil-military and military-civilian relations

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