This comprehensive case study of the modern Peruvian military examines the professional development of South America's most controversial military establishment from the early 1930s to the present. Based on extensive research in Peruvian military archives and numerous interviews with active and retired members of the Peruvian armed forces, this study is placed in the context of Peruvian national politics and South American military affairs. Particular emphasis is given to the impact of France and U.S. military theory upon the Peruvian military mentality. Revolutionary politics from the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA) in the 1930s to the present day's Sendero Luminoso also figure prominently. This study also explores the rationale behind General Velasco's social and economic reforms (1968-1975) and assesses the Velasco government's legacy for contemporary Peru. For the first time, the Soviet Union's heavy involvement in Peru is examined. As the only comprehensive case study in English of the modern Peruvian military, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary Latin America. This is a detailed historical study of the highly complex Peruvian military establishment and its place in Peruvian society. It includes a review of the 1930s; an in-depth analysis of the armed forces from the late 1930s to the first Belaunde regime (1963-1968); the immediate antecedents of Peru's 12-year military government (1968-1980) known as the Docenio; preliminary overview of the Docenio and its troubled legacy; an assessment of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) insurgency; and a critique of the armed force's counter terrorism campaign. Militarism and Politics in Latin America draws extensively on Latin American and U.S. archival sources, and personal interviews, and includes rare photographs.

Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America elucidates why many state-actors in the Global South exhibit a remarkable degree of policy continuity in their external behavior despite structural incentives for change. This book contends that the theoretical notion of strategic culture is instructive to explain such a puzzle. It extends the application of strategic culture beyond the policy of nuclear deterrence among great powers into other equally strategic areas of policy, such as diplomacy, political economy, regional international institutions, legal norms, politico-military institutions, and different security agendas beyond war and peace, for example, the illicit drug-trade and peacekeeping missions. The overall contribution of this book is three-fold: first, it rescues, updates, and expands the original conceptual and theoretical dimensions of strategic culture. Second, it extrapolates further theoretical implications of the concept through its application to five policy domains in Latin America beyond the original application of the strategic culture perspective to nuclear weapons strategy among great powers in the 1970s. Third, it draws together the theoretical and policy implications of the strategic cultures in Latin America and identifies possible applications for other peripheral, non-great power policy areas and issues in the Global South. This book will be of interest to academics, graduate and undergraduate students, policy analysts, and practitioners of Latin American Studies, International Relations Theory and Security Studies.

A comprehensive account of every major war and battle fought in the Americas, this revised edition of the award-winning Wars of the Americas offers up-to-date scholarship on the conflicts that have shaped a hemisphere. When it was first published in 1998, Wars of the Americas: A Chronology of Armed Conflict in the Western Hemisphere was the only major reference focused exclusively on warfare in all its forms in North, Central, and South America over the past five centuries. Now this acclaimed resource returns in a dramatically expanded new edition. For its second edition, Wars of the Americas has been doubled in size to two full volumes: the first covers all wars and major battles from the earliest Spanish conquests through the 18th-century colonial rivalries that gripped the hemisphere. The second volume covers covers the American Revolutionary War and all subsequent conflicts up to the present. In addition to exhaustive updating throughout and a deeper focus on the historical context of each conflict, the new edition includes new coverage of the present-day drug cartel wars, international terrorism, and the ever-evolving relationships between the United States and the nations of Latin America.