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Sights of soldiers patrolling urban neighborhoods, responding to reported crimes in progress, collecting evidence, and staffing checkpoints on major highways are increasingly common worldwide. Latin America, now the most violent region in the world, is no exception in the trend to militarize law enforcement. In Mexico, for example, more than 67,000 troops have participated in widespread policing operations since 2006 (Ordorica 2011). In Brazil, the armed forces have helped state governments regain control of urban areas, with soldiers patrolling city streets on nearly 100 days in 2016 (The Economist 2017). In Honduras, the government created the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) in 2013 to combat drug trafficking and close to 6,000 soldiers take part in joint army-police operations (Secretaría de Defensa Nacional de Honduras 2013). Even countries that historically have lacked a military, like Costa Rica and Panama, are considering proposals to militarize law enforcement.
The involvement of the region’s militaries in domestic security might have been common during military dictatorships, but it had been unusual in democratic regimes. While military regimes relied on their own cadre for internal policing or incorporated the police into the military’s repressive apparatus, as in Argentina, Chile, or Uruguay (Pereira 2005), contemporary democracies tend to have a separation between the roles of police (public safety) and military (national security)—a central element in civil-military relations conducive to civilian control over the military (Dammert and Bailey 2005). As the evidence we present suggests, this distinction is increasingly less meaningful in Latin American democracies, where governments have militarized public safety and recast the role of the armed forces for domestic law enforcement purposes.
Despite the prevalence of militarized law enforcement, scholarly, policy, and journalistic attention has mostly focused on a fairly narrow form of militarization—namely when the police take on similarities to militaries—with a fairly narrow geographic range: the United States. Existing research has focused on the prevalence of SWAT teams with military-grade weapons in police departments across the United States (Balko 2013; Kraska 2007), whether they have strained police-community relations (American Civil Liberties Union 2014) or had an effect on levels of violence (Delehanty et al. 2017).
While this research constitutes an important first step, it has neglected the prevalence and consequences of other forms of militarization taking place...