When is a Minister not just a Minister?

6 hours researching/reading

This week's blog monitor is Laura Ascenzi-Moreno, in New York. Laura is a Queens chick who is devoted to understanding and strengthening early literacy experiences of bilingual students. She's starting her 9th (!!) year as a teacher and curriculum coach at the Cypress Hills Community School, the only school in NYC to have a shared directorship between a principal and a parent. Welcome Laura, thanks, and happy birthday! Laura will start monitoring tomorrow.

Worked on expanding my database of military governments in Latin America from 1945 back to 1910. Got about halfway through, and will aim to finish tomorrow. Also picked up math again after a couple of weeks of not doing it while at the library. Turns out my department is now teaching a math for political science course, so I downloaded the syllabus, which will help tremendously in guiding my self-directed efforts.

I also did some reading about the Chilean Carabineros, one of two national police agencies in that country. Chile is in many ways my "opposite case" of Colombia, with highly militarized security forces and susceptible to coups. So I was interested to learn that the Carabineros were actually under the Ministry of the Interior, as opposed to the Ministry of Defense, between 1925 and 1973. It was only under Pinochet that they moved to Defense. I'll want to look more into who had effective control over them at the local level. This confirms my suspicion that Ministry affiliation, while part of the story, is not where the action is. There's not a lot of variation in this regard; most countries appear to have put the police under the Interior pretty early on (which in Latin America means not the environment portfolio, like in the U.S., but a sort of catch-all political portfolio; in Chile, for example, there's no formal Vice President, but when the President is out of the country, the Interior Minister becomes Vice President and exercises a kind of minding-the-store authority). The real question is who controls them at the state and local level, which I continue to investigate.

Tomorrow I'll aim to wrap up the military-government database, analyze trends, and start writing up what I find and its implications for my case study of Colombia.