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Public Security Forces with Private Funding: Local Army Entrepreneurship in Peru and Ecuador

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Maiah Jaskoski
Maiah Jaskoski*
Affiliation:
Naval Postgraduate School
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Abstract

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In Latin America's young democracies, actors in the private sector may influence military security work through resource transfers, with implications for state accountability and democracy in the region. This analysis finds that in Ecuador and Peru local army commanders—who frequently decide when and where army operations are conducted—make decisions not according to technical evaluations of security requirements but rather on the basis of how much local clients pay. The article's local political economy perspective enables us to identify client influence, even in cases in which client and national security interests overlap. The study also helps bridge two literatures: research on Latin American civil-military relations, which has devoted a great amount of attention to military autonomy vis-à-vis the government without systematically analyzing third-party influence on armed forces, and scholarship on security privatization, which has examined such third-party financing but without underscoring the fact that clients can engage with the military directly, bypassing the national government.

Resumo

Resumo

En las nuevas democracias latinoamericanas, los actores del sector privado pueden influir en el trabajo de seguridad militar, a través de la transferencia de recursos, con implicaciones para la responsabilidad estatal y la democracia regional. El presente análisis encuentra que en Ecuador y en el Perú, comandantes locales del ejército —quienes deciden directamente cuándo y dónde se realizan operaciones militares— no toman decisiones de acuerdo con las evaluaciones técnicas de los requisitos de seguridad, sino basadas en el monto que pagan los clientes locales. Centrándose en la economía política local, este artículo nos permite identificar la influencia de los clientes, incluso en casos de beneficio mutuo para los clientes y la seguridad nacional. El estudio ofrece un vínculo entre dos discursos académicos: investigaciones sobre las relaciones cívico-militares latinoamericanas, que se han enfocado en la autonomía militar en relación con el gobierno, sin analizar sistemáticamente la influencia de terceros sobre las fuerzas armadas; e investigaciones sobre la privatización de seguridad, que han examinado el financiamiento por terceros sin considerar que los clientes pueden contratar a esas fuerzas directamente, sobrepasando al gobierno nacional.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , 2012 , pp. 79 - 99
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

I thank Kent Eaton, J. Samuel Fitch, Candelaria Garay, Stephanie McNulty, Arturo Sotomayor, Harold Trinkunas, Zach Zwald, members of the Transnational and Local Dynamics in the Andes Research Cluster of the Chicano Latino Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the three anonymous LARR reviewers for their exceptionally helpful feedback on earlier versions of this article. This study would not have been possible without the generosity of many individuals in Ecuador and Peru who shared with me their time and views, and for their help I am deeply grateful. Fieldwork was supported by a National Security Education Program David L. Boren Graduate Fellowship and the Naval Postgraduate School Research Initiation Program. The findings presented here are those of the author and do not represent positions of the US Navy, Department of Defense, or government.

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