Perfecting Coercion in an Era of State Consolidation, c. 1870 to c. 1940

In the first phase of state formation, public violence was largely driven by internal conflicts among power-seekers loyal to a plurality of rival criteria of legitimacy. During the second phase (c.

Dictatorial methods of rule found institutional expression in the gradual emergence of national armies whose troops were increasingly conscripted, and who served under the command of men trained by European military missions in national service academies. Where they could, these armies absorbed or neutralised, through cooptive techniques, the more formidable caudillo-led bands. Where such measures failed, extermination was their usual fate, as was that of the semi-autonomous or rebellious Indian groups that inhabited the national peripheries, particularly of Argentina, Chile and northern Mexico. Having worked out a modus vivendi with the Spanish monarchy in the latter years of the Bourbon dynasty - sometimes siding with Spain in the turmoil of 1808-24 - these so-called ‘independent Indians' found that their success in evading the reach of the phase-one quasi-states would be temporary.

Military professionalisation had the paradoxical effect of politicising the officer corps, which increasingly saw itself as the patriotic and technically competent counterweight to a corrupt caste of greedy, power-hungry poli­ticians. A concomitant tendency towards institutional autonomy and social detachment, enhanced by constitutional provisions sanctioning unilateral military intervention in times of political crisis, engendered a new kind of militarism. In the 1920s and 30s, a wave of unconstitutional government successions in thirteen countries counted on the participation of the military, a tendency that hardened into the outright seizure of power by military dictators in the 1930s in fifteen countries, some of whom continued to rule into the 1940s and 50s. Although guided by a diversity of ideological autho­rities, extending from right to left and including at times a melange of both, the dictators in uniform typically shared a strongly statist, developmentalist and authoritarian approach to government, and thus a readiness to punish dissenters, rebels and agitators who occasionally resorted to violence them­selves in the course of objecting to the terms and conditions of industrial employment or, in the case of rural cultivators, to the loss of customary rights to land.^[868] The threats posed by such protests to the social order, and to the stability of economies heavily dependent on one or two commodities for export and on the confidence of foreign capitalists, frequently generated a violent response from the state. Within weeks of ousting an elected left­wing civilian government in December 1931, El Salvador's army - the best in Central America - repressed a rural rebellion by massacring 8,000-10,000 people during the first few months of 1932. In similar circumstances, civilian governments were often no less ready to unleash the military. In 1907, Chilean soldiers machine-gunned to death striking nitrate workers and their families in a school yard in Iquique; the estimates of lives lost range from hundreds to a thousand or more.

Similar tactics applied the same year by the Mexican liberal-dictatorial regime of General Porfirio Diaz have been widely cited as precursors of the most profoundly destructive civil war (1910-20) in the history of Latin America. In 1906 and 1907, after thirty-one years in power, Diaz's government still seemed to be unshakeably in command when its armed forces con­fronted striking copper miners at a US-owned mine, and factory hands at a French-owned textile mill. To the dozen or so deaths at the mine were added fifty to seventy at the textile mill. Widely publicised and exploited by the rising political opposition, these events eroded the legitimacy of the regime. But weightier still were grievances among rural cultivators over declining access to land and deteriorating working conditions stemming from the export-led development policies of the Diaz dictatorship. The campesinos converted a liberalist political revolt in 1910-11 into a social revolu­tion that would take the lives of at least a million Mexicans in the course of establishing a state that would go on to implement the most thoroughgoing and extensive land reform in Latin America, while guaranteeing urban work­ers the right to organise and strike. The revoutionary regime's fiercely anti­Catholic policies would, however, ignite a counter-revolution (the Cristero War) in 1926-9 that would harvest the lives of still another 100,000 comba­tants by the time the two sides - devout Catholics versus the Mexican state - negotiated a settlement that essentially ratified the revolutionary state's power to continue controlling (albeit somewhat less oppressively) traditional religious expression, until constitutional and statutory revisions were adopted in 1992.

In this phase, only Mexico's civil war qualifies as one fought largely to revolutionise society, making it a harbinger of the revolutionary movements that swept Latin America after the 1950s. On the other hand, except for the land redistribution and pro-labour legislation of the 1930s, the state-affiliated and financed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in its Spanish acronym) governed Mexico until the 1990s according to principles that deviated little from those of the dictatorship that it replaced. In comparative terms, how­ever, Mexico's epochal revolution, whose populistic attributes the ruling party managed to elevate to a patriotic myth, delivered a state that produced what no other Latin American country could in the twentieth century: eight continuous decades of stable, civilian government, without a single instance of military intervention or interruption of the constitutional succession of presidents.

In Colombia, factions of liberals and conservatives, unable to produce their own counterpart of the widely admired General Diaz of Mexico, continued to rise up in arms against one another in the 1880s and 90s, until the cataclysmic War of the Thousand Days (1899-1901), which took uncounted tens of thousands of lives. The relative tranquillity of the four decades after 1901 climaxed in 1930 with the country's first peaceful change of the party in power, though the worst carnage in Colombia's history awaited it in the second half of the century. In Venezuela, for most of the period from the 1870s to the 1950s, self-styled generals rose up, mobilised their clients, and ruled in the colourful, personalistic fashion of the traditional caudillo. In both republics, military professionalisation lagged as the armed forces only very gradually shed their clientelistic character, despite the establishment of military academies and the presence of foreign military training missions.

In the Southern Cone countries, whose economies had achieved consider­ably higher levels of growth and diversification, military professionalisation and institutional stability advanced considerably beyond almost anywhere else in Latin America.

In the countries of the Caribbean basin, including those of the isthmus of Central America, public violence in this phase was not so easily distinguished from that of the first. The state's markedly patrimonial and therefore impro­visational character, and the persistence of a clientelistic rather than profes­sional relationship between the typically despotic executive and his armed forces, nourished violence and instability. The situation increasingly drew the attention of the United States, particularly from the 1890s onward, the decade that marked its emergence as a world power and the beginning of its role as a significant participant in the public violence of the Caribbean basin coun­tries. Driven as much, if not more, by legitimate security interests as by imperialistic ambitions, US military interventions were typically followed by long-term military occupations and US administrative oversight.