By Dario Montero
MONTEVIDEO, May 8 2003 (IPS)

South America has yet to define a new role for its militaries since the end of the Cold War, but it is clear that the legacy of the security scheme from that era is dead and buried, although the United States would prefer otherwise, say defence experts.

The Sep. 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, the subsequent "war on terrorism", and the reinstatement of the Inter- American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR) have fuelled debate about regional security, but it has so far failed to produce agreements or a common military doctrine.

And several South American countries lack clear definitions about the function of their military forces, with ensuing confusion because their basic purpose of defending territorial sovereignty overlaps with international peace missions and even with domestic public security duties.

"The level of complexity in today’s world calls into question the role of the armed forces in terms of national defence and public safety," said Marcelo Sain, professor at Argentina’s University of Quilmes and one of the panellists at a seminar that ended Thursday in Montevideo.

Sain noted that the difficulties in approaching the matter are greater in the countries of Mercosur (Southern Common Market) than in the rest of South America because "it entails, although as an undercurrent, the revision of the past," the military dictatorships of the Southern Cone nations in the 1970s and 1980s.

"When one talks about the institutional role of the armed forces, one is talking about the possibility of rethinking military intervention in political affairs," he said.

But at the centre of this debate is the need to figure out how Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) will resolve the matter of common defence, which in the opinion of Brazilian presidential adviser Marco Aurelio García entails the bloc’s development and its integration with the rest of Latin America.

"Security without development means repression," García, international policy adviser to Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio da Silva, said in a conversation with IPS.

Following the Sep. 11 attacks, at the behest of Washington, "they tried to revive the corpse that was the TIAR." It was a solution supported by Lula’s successor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "but it doesn’t appear to have been the best one," García said.

Ten days after the attacks, on Sep. 21, 2001, the foreign ministers of the Americas harkened back to the principles of the TIAR and declared that the terrorist attacks against the United States were an act of aggression against all nations of the Americas.

Argentina had expressed reservations about invoking the TIAR, a treaty signed in 1947 at the dawn of the Cold War and involving 23 of the 34 member countries of the Organisation of American States (OAS).

The TIAR was practically given up for dead in 1982 when Argentina invoked the accord during the Malvinas/Falklands War. The move was vetoed by the United States, which threw its support behind its historic ally Britain’s bid to recover its colony in the South Atlantic.

In September 2002, a year after the attacks in the United States had revived the military pact of the Americas, it was Mexico that rebelled, and became the first to announce its withdrawal from the treaty.

The Mexican government, under President Vicente Fox, justified its stance by asserting that TIAR had been made obsolete "by a global system in which the vulnerability of nations does not lie only in purely military or ideological threats."

The Mexican Foreign Secretariat announced that it was seeking a new regional security scheme, one with a multidimensional approach that would include protection of public health and the environment, as well as efforts to fight drug trafficking and terrorism.

Brazilian presidential adviser García expressed his agreement with the Mexican position in an interview with IPS during the seminar "State of Law and National Defence in Mercosur", held in the Uruguayan capital this week.

"The security pacts in Latin America will have to be radically revised and the TIAR, which is an instrument that emerged during the Cold War, does not seem to be the appropriate way to continue," García said.

But he did not go as far as the Mexican government, and clarified: "This does not mean that Brazil is going to abandon TIAR now, that we are going to propose an alternative, but I don’t think we can invoke it again like we did after the attacks in New York and Washington."

These questions will be taken up at the Special Conference on Hemispheric Security, originally slated for this month in Mexico, but postponed until the last quarter of this year.

García noted that the Lula administration wants to focus Brazil’s defence activities on crisis situations, such as that of the Brazil-Colombia border, where arms and drug trafficking and the Colombian civil war have created lawlessness.

Military actions there would require a bilateral accord to prevent the zone from further aggravating the domestic security of either of the two countries.

Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim has suggested imposing an arms embargo in the region to pave the way for peace, a mechanism similar to the United Nations effort in Angola, said García.

On another front, García played down the notion that the tri- border area of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay poses a regional threat, as has been repeatedly suggested since the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks due to the alleged presence there of "sleeper cells" of Islamic extremists linked to the Al Qaeda network.

"The problems of the triple border have been exaggerated and, although the area does have its troubles, it does not pose a threat to the security of Brazil, nor – we think – to the rest of the neighbouring countries. That opinion is shared by our intelligence agencies," García said.

Many of the security officials and experts gathered in Montevideo agreed that it would be wrongheaded to return to linking national defence and public security, as was the norm during the region’s dictatorships that began in the 1970s.

Argentina is free of that political game, as the commander of the armed forces, Gen. Ricardo Brinzoni, has made clear, said Ernesto López, director of the "armed forces and society" research programme at the University of Quilmes.

López told IPS that Brinzoni has publicly criticised the proposal of Argentina’s former president Carlos Menem (1989-1999) to use military troops to fight crime, an issue Menem has championed during the current presidential campaign on the way to the May 18 run-off vote.

"When Menem says ‘I am going to deploy the army on the streets’, not only would it be illegal, but the political conditions do not exist to do so," said López.

Sain agreed with his University of Quilmes colleague, telling those gathered for the seminar that the military is not equipped to carry out domestic security due to operational problems as well, "because they do not know how to conduct criminal intelligence, nor do they have the training."

In South America, there are no wars between countries, but complex crime-related problems within them, Sain told an audience of academics, government officials and uniformed officers.

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