POLITICS AND MILITARY ECONOMICS ON THE SOUTHERN CONE - DEMOCRACY, ARMS PRODUCTION AND ARMS-RACE IN ARGENTINA, BRAZIL AND CHILE

This essay examines the consolidation of a new pattern of civil-military relations in the post-authoritarian Southern Cone. A significant shift has taken place on the part of the militaries, in which the long-term strategic interests of the armed forces have been linked with the military production capabilities in the context of new democratic regimes. Thus, it is suggested that more attention should be paid to armaments production to understand the autonomy, prerogatives, and political power of the armed forces in these societies. Similarly, frequent allusions to the retreat of the military as a political actor in Latin America miss the rearticulation of military power and the redefinition of the armed forces' national development strategies in an effort to maintain the technological sophistication of their arms production capabilities. This study also argues that the perception of external threat has played a more important role than usually assumed in determining military economics and the militarization of conflicts in the region (both during military and civilian regimes) and that the generalized presence of civilian regimes in the region tells us much less than it is suppossed to with respect to future perspectives of regional armamentism. Regional military political-economics shows different case by equilibria and an assessment of future perspectives can not but analyze these diverse equilibria in an interrelated strategic setting (instead as ''parallel'' products mostly determined by purely domestic processes). Therefore, the final section of the paper poses probable medium-term tendencies of regional armamentism as a function of the interaction among the diverse national military political-economics, concluding that, in spite of the democratic consolidations, a revival of the regional arms race is the most probable scenario.