Civilian-controlled Militaries Keep Coups Out of Latin America Plus Trump's VP Pick Signals Hawkish Latin America Policy

Civilian-controlled militaries keep coups out of Latin America. Last month, a Bolivian general staged an anomaly: he attempted to overthrow the government in a coup. Indeed, since 1992 there have been just four countries with successful coups across Latin America and the Caribbean: Bolivia, Haiti, Honduras, and Venezuela. In each of these cases, militaries took power only briefly or acted at the behest of civilians. The Cline Center at the University of Illinois, which categorizes coups in every country since 1945, calls coups “successful” when they effectively displace authorities—regardless of whether coup leaders stay in power.

Latin America’s tendency toward fewer coups is in stark contrast to Africa where militaries haven’t just launched coups, but have remained embedded in politics and loomed large over civilian authorities in recent years. Since 1992, revolts have displaced governments in nearly thirty African countries, including Gabon and Mali, where a lack of real elections led militaries to launch coups in 2020 and 2023.

As important is civilian control of the military. After the wave of South American military dictatorships in the 1970s, new democratic governments asserted control. Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Colombia, Paraguay, and Brazil all appointed and empowered civilian defense ministers in the 1980s and 1990s. From that time on, active duty and retired military personnel rarely held seats in the region’s legislatures and executive branches. In 2000, the Chilean Supreme Court stripped the former military dictator Augusto Pinochet of his parliamentary immunity as “senator for life”, and a 2005 reform ended the military’s constitutional right to appoint senators and judges. And civilian budgets turned to other spending, further limiting the military brass’s power. Argentina’s military spending more than halved in the 1990s and Peru’s fell to less than a quarter of what it was in 1987.

This could change. Mexico pushed the military out of politics and into the barracks a century ago, yet now has expanded their societal and political role—and ensuing budgets—to encompass internal security, controlling migration, and managing ports, airports, customs, and critical infrastructure. Brazil’s previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, appointed generals as nearly half his ministers, including of health and defense—the first such military appointment in almost two decades. This path, if followed by others, would undermine the region’s great democratic strength and success.

Trump’s Vance VP pick signals a Latin America policy hawkish on migration and Mexican organized crime. Trump’s VP pick suggests his second term Latin America policy, if he wins, is likely to take extreme steps against irregular migration and fentanyl. 

Vance often argues the United States needs to devote more attention and resources to its southern border to stop irregular migrants and fentanyl rather than sending aid to Ukraine, saying “[o]ne of them very directly affects our vital national security interests, one of them kills our people, and the other doesn’t.” He supports Trump’s proposal to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Vance also opposes the Cuban-Haitian-Nicaraguan-Venezuelan visa parole program—and other amnesties for irregular migrants—and voted against the bipartisan border deal earlier this year. His positions reflect those of the Republican party base, which ranks drug trafficking above China or Russia in terms of foreign policy threats. 

Both Vance and former President Trump endorse designating Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations and deploying the U.S. military against these criminal groups despite the inevitable strain that would put on relations with the United States’ biggest trading partner. Vance also wants to impose a 10 percent tax on remittances, which would impact the more than $150 billion in remittances currently flowing annually to households and boosting economies throughout the region. All these moves risk straining relationships in the hemisphere, but fit naturally with the rest of the “America First” agenda.

This publication is part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy.