Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Borón, Atilio A.
Romano, Silvina María
Materias
Temporal Coverage
2000-2019
Idioma
spa
Extent
333 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
USA
PER
BOL
2000-2019
Abstract
The hemispheric security policy developed by the United States (US) since the Cold War has consisted of making the “geopolitical adjustments” necessary to adapt national policies and regional dynamics to the needs of US national security. To achieve this goal, the US has deployed a variety of tools to sustain the prevailing accumulation system, in particular the flow of strategic materials from the periphery to the center, at a time when this system is threatened by sectors of the society that are opposed to different degrees to this order. In the present work, the US security policies in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), as means to guarantee the geopolitical and geoeconomic interests of the US government and private sector, and their concrete manifestation in Peru and Bolivia from 2000 to 2019 were investigated. Peru and Bolivia are key cases since they are territories linked by the constant expansion of "threats" from the perspective of US security: drug trafficking and terrorism, as "two sides of a coin", according to the narrative manufactured from US government agencies, consulting firms, and think tanks. This thesis based on two hypotheses: (i) in Peru, successive governments have maintained a systematic dependence with the Washington's postulates whereas (ii) in Bolivia, the efforts of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) since 2006 marked a break-up in the historical influence of US, especially in defense and security.
The analysis performed is built on the concept of manufacturing consent in a geopolitical key, and the US incidence in security. By employing this approach, the available information was raised as a central element for the analysis of official documents from different agencies of the US government, reports from relevant think tanks on security matters, intelligence and security consultants, expert testimonies before Congress, expert opinion voices in the media, and documents leaked by Wikileaks. Moreover, in view of the multiple pathways of the US incidence in matter of security and defense, this work's emphasis was placed on security assistance. The latter dimension also illustrates the militaristic nature of US foreign policy at the periphery, which allowed showing a series of serial data at regional level and to deep into specific cases. The official US foreign assistance database -USAID Explorer- was used as the primary source of information.
The more interesting contributions of this research are (i) providing a complete overview of the institutional engineering through which the hundreds of assistance programs work, and (ii) detecting its "anchorage roots" in the state structures of the Latin American region, as well as (iii) describing the capillarity of the established links. Data also reveal the ideological reproduction (closely related to the manufacturing consent on enemies and threats) linked to a network of personal and institutional relationships between the US and Latin American security forces, which impacts on internal politics and has the potential to redefine the direction of the political, economic and social processes from territories addressed in certain situations. In the case of Peru, the results indicate that both the manufacture of geopolitical consent and the incidence in security and defense matters have been pointed to the stabilization of the ruling elites to guarantee the alignment with the US hemispheric security. In the case of Bolivia, these dimensions have been clearly oriented to destabilization the process of change driven by the MAS govern. Finally, it is important to highlight that this work was guided by the desire that the results presented, at least partly, will influence (even a little) in the decision-making of local governments and integration processes that aim to regain sovereignty and the self-determination of the States and for the peoples of Our America.
The analysis performed is built on the concept of manufacturing consent in a geopolitical key, and the US incidence in security. By employing this approach, the available information was raised as a central element for the analysis of official documents from different agencies of the US government, reports from relevant think tanks on security matters, intelligence and security consultants, expert testimonies before Congress, expert opinion voices in the media, and documents leaked by Wikileaks. Moreover, in view of the multiple pathways of the US incidence in matter of security and defense, this work's emphasis was placed on security assistance. The latter dimension also illustrates the militaristic nature of US foreign policy at the periphery, which allowed showing a series of serial data at regional level and to deep into specific cases. The official US foreign assistance database -USAID Explorer- was used as the primary source of information.
The more interesting contributions of this research are (i) providing a complete overview of the institutional engineering through which the hundreds of assistance programs work, and (ii) detecting its "anchorage roots" in the state structures of the Latin American region, as well as (iii) describing the capillarity of the established links. Data also reveal the ideological reproduction (closely related to the manufacturing consent on enemies and threats) linked to a network of personal and institutional relationships between the US and Latin American security forces, which impacts on internal politics and has the potential to redefine the direction of the political, economic and social processes from territories addressed in certain situations. In the case of Peru, the results indicate that both the manufacture of geopolitical consent and the incidence in security and defense matters have been pointed to the stabilization of the ruling elites to guarantee the alignment with the US hemispheric security. In the case of Bolivia, these dimensions have been clearly oriented to destabilization the process of change driven by the MAS govern. Finally, it is important to highlight that this work was guided by the desire that the results presented, at least partly, will influence (even a little) in the decision-making of local governments and integration processes that aim to regain sovereignty and the self-determination of the States and for the peoples of Our America.
Título obtenido
Doctora de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales