The Other Militaries

The CAMeNA archive in Mexico City contains fascinating testimony from members of the Latin America’s armed forces who remained loyal to constitutions and democracies and stood up (often at the cost of their rank, their liberty and sometimes their lives) against golpistas, the oligarchies, and US-inspired National Security doctrines. Cornelia Gräbner reports.

In what seems to have been his last public intervention, in November 1989, Gregorio Selser gave a talk on ‘Militares democráticos’, ‘Militaries [or armed forces] for Democracy.’ Selser meant those members of the armed forces who saw themselves as servants of the people in democratic societies and who refused to make common cause with, or act on the behest of, oppressive regimes, golpistas, oligarchies, or foreign imperialist forces.

Many of these serving members of the armed forces paid dearly for their courage and steadfast adherence to their principles. Many voices and names – especially when they were lower-ranking – are now forgotten. Better-known examples include Colonel Jacobo Árbenz, Guatemala’s democratically elected president, who was deposed by a coup d’etat in 1954, publicly humiliated, and spent the remainder of his life in exile; Generals René Schneider and Carlos Prats, both commanders-in-chief of Chile’s armed forces, were assassinated by coup-plotters and the Chilean secret service respectively; and Brigadier General Francisco Gallardo, who was sent to jail on trumped-up charges after he insisted on creating checks and balances and an ombudsman for the Mexican armed forces. Their own institution, comrades and superiors often looked upon these immensely courageous and deeply principled dissidents as traitors.

References to them can be found in many collections at the CAMeNA. We find documents such as the manuscript of Selser’s talk, the manuscript of his last, unpublished book entitled Los otros militares, the material he compiled while researching it, magazines edited by the Centro de Estudios Militares General Carlos Prats, and a book edited by the Organización de Militares por la Democracia, la Integración y la Liberación de América Latina y el Caribe  (OMIDELAC) ¹⁾OMIDELAC was active for only about two years, 1986-88, which is inscribed to Selser by the then-president of this organisation, General Richelieu Levoyer.

Committed democrats

There were different currents amongst these democratic – or, as Selser put it, ‘other’ – militaries. But all shared a commitment to Latin American self-determination and democracy, which included a rejection of direct or indirect intervention by foreign forces, and the commitment to economic development in the service of social justice and civic equality. They refused to consider dissidents as internal enemies, thus going against the grain of the most frequent use of the armed forces in Latin America, not to defend national territory – wars between the nations of the region were mercifully rare  – but to oppress and discipline those who opposed the status quo of injustice and oppression.

They specifically opposed the doctrine of national security propounded by US military schools (notably the School of the Americas in Panama, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation and relocated to Fort Benning Georgia) and training programmes which taught more than 60,000 Latin American military, police and security personnel. This training had emphasized ‘the enemy within’, ‘subversives’ to be identified and eliminated by responsible military leaders at all costs.

Some of these other militaries acted on their internationalist convictions and joined revolutionary projects in other Latin American countries – for example, Nicaragua – or anti-colonial liberation struggles in other continents, mostly Africa. Others, when faced with anti-democratic, oppressive and violent regimes, opted for military uprisings or counter-coups, with the intention of returning the country to democracy. Most of these uprisings were quashed.

In the Introduction to its foundational documents, OMIDELAC draws a clear distinction: the Armed Forces of ‘other latitudes, especially Europe, emerged from the wars that created nation states, and then served the imperialist aims of their countries. These armies were fundamentally armies of conquest, and their generals were conquerors’. In Latin America, by contrast, the shared (though imposed) Spanish language and history found resonance in ‘the shared liberatory aims which expected of our armies that after the liberation of one nation, they assist[ed] in the liberation of their neighbours, without seeking territorial gains and without displaying an attitude of domination’.

This implied that the armed forces should oppose imperialist powers which, in collusion with or invited by the reactionary forces in Latin America, stood in the way of a continent where everyone could live in justice, peace and dignity – an aspiration OMIDELAC extended to all nations of the world.

They espoused disarmament and Latin American non-alignment and argued for lower defence spending so that more resources could be designated for what they saw as the ‘most important problem that humanity is confronting: to strengthen peace on the planet and therefore, in the region; and to radically improve the living conditions of thousands of people in the world and therefore, in the region’.

Constitutionalists

The Chilean ‘constitutionalists’ considered themselves strictly observant of the constitution and therefore, loyal to the democratically elected government, since 1969 that of Salvador Allende. Many of them were high-ranking officers. Schneider was assassinated in 1970 in a botched kidnap attempt by a far-right group led by two mutinous generals in 1970, with weapons supplied by the CIA, because he refused to disregard election result and prevent Allende from assuming the presidency ²⁾Some details emerged in the Church Committee Report to the US Senate in 1975, but the CIA documents were only released 25 years later by President Bill Clinton. This is analysed in the 2020 National Security Archive Briefing by Peter Kornbluh and Savannah Bock.

After the 1973 coup which overthrew Salvador Allende and the government of Popular Unity, the constitutionalists were relentlessly persecuted, stripped of their jobs and pensions, imprisoned, tortured and some of them killed. General Prats was assassinated by a commando of the Chilean secret service while in exile in Argentina. General Bachelet died of a heart attack, as the result of torture, while a prisoner in the Airforce War Academy. Others, like Captain Raúl Vergara, were imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced in concocted trials based on manufactured evidence and ‘confessions’ obtained under torture. Vergara was sentenced to death. Thanks to international pressure he was spared and released into exile to Britain, subsequently becoming an adviser to the Nicaraguan air force during the Sandinista government in the 1980s.

The constitutionalists who survived and went into exile, formed organisations such as the Fuerzas Armadas Democráticas and, in Mexico, the Centro de Estudios Militares de America Latina, which was eventually renamed Centro de Estudios Militares General Carlos Prats. They organized seminars and regularly published a journal, of which the CAMeNA holds copies. Like-minded groups included the Argentine CENIDA and UALA. A regular event was the Foro sobre Defensa Nacional y Latinoaméricana – Forum for National and Latin American Defence.

Two decades later, in 1993, Mexican Brigadier General Francisco Javier Gallardo was imprisoned for eight years on trumped-up charges. He had frequently voiced concerns about systematic abuse of power within the Mexican army and had called for the creation of an ombudsman. When his concerns were not heard, he became a whistleblower.

The publisher of the magazine which aired his views was accused of libel, while Gallardo was subjected to a three-year trial riddled with inconsistencies. The National Human Rights Commission and the International PEN Club called for his release, and Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience. The General was sentenced to 14 years in prison. In 2001 he was released due to pressure from an international Human Rights campaign. Many of his personal papers are now available to the public in Collection E at the CAMeNA.

The ‘other militaries’ have been rejected and dismissed by some because they were members of the armed forces, and persecuted by others because they broke the tyranny of the military esprit de corps. With immense courage and integrity – and often paying a high price – they set an example of how individuals, even when they are part of an organisation as powerful, close-knit and hierarchical as the armed forces, can think critically and act on their own better judgement when democracy is at stake.