From micro to macro

7 hours researching/reading

Having been immersed in micro-level data on electoral patterns at the town level in the state of Tolima, I must have been looking for a change of perspective, because I gravitated today toward a very different type of data: patterns of military government in Latin America since World War II. (Thank you Wikipedia, y gracias Wikipedia en espaniol.) Quite illuminating. My argument hinges on the exception to the rule: Colombia bucks the trend of Latin American countries being chronically susceptible to military dictatorships. I want to say that this is part of its own trend rather than being an outlier to another trend. So I need to situate Colombia in the context of other Latin American republics in the same time period. This is helpful in identifying potentially similar cases. The obvious ones were always Mexico and Costa Rica, but I was interested to see that Ecuador has less experience with military government than I'd expected.

Tomorrow, I'm going to extend the timeline back to 1910 to see if the postwar trends hold. All this will help frame the chapter on "Colombia in comparative perspective."

Also went through some recent reading, extracting the most relevant points that I'd highlighted. One potentially important idea that emerged from an edited collection on the Latin American military called Rank and Privilege was the role of the frontier in nation-building, and its impact on/connection to security forces. Money quote:

"[In countries] such as Argentina and Chile, campaigns against indigenous groups stimulated the modernization of the army and enhanced the stature of the institution" (p. xiv).

Is that what happened in the U.S., too? A big part of the story in Colombia during La Violencia is about life on the frontier; it's the areas that are most sparsely settled, where peasants have recently established themselves on land long in the nominal possession of large landowners and are fighting for the right to stay, that you see the violence evolve from politically motivated to economically based. That shift is a key part of the story that Mary Roldan tells in Blood and Fire. What Rodriguez suggests here is that the frontier story goes back to the 19th century, and that it had a critical role in the growth and development of the security forces.

I guess I need to watch some Westerns about cattle rustling....