Building an “International Barracks”: Transnational Circulation as Precursor to Military Rule in Southern South America

While they are often studied in isolation, the military dictatorships of southern South America’s 1970s were fundamentally transnational projects. An increasingly robust literature on cross-border intelligence sharing and clandestine surveillance has made it clear that the regimes governing Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay collaborated directly to capture and kill insurgents and human rights activists across and beyond the region. In fact, transnational cooperation was not a product of military rule, but its precursor. In the three decades following the end of World War II, martial thinkers from across southern South America collaborated with each other and with officials from the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere as they worked to generate the new visions of counterrevolutionary governance that would engulf most of the region.

This paper offers an overview of the “international barracks” that emerged during these fertile decades, focusing on two particularly rich centers of collaboration: the Superior War Colleges of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While part of a single network, the two institutions played distinct roles. Argentina’s Superior War College functioned as a hub of interpersonal exchange, hosting military officers from across Latin America, the U.S., and Europe for one- to three-year-long periods of study, just as the country was earning global fame for its especially violent approach to urban counterinsurgency. The Brazilian Superior War College, in contrast, did not take many foreign students. Instead, it drew thinkers from across the world, who traveled there to give lectures and contribute to the so-called “national security doctrine” that would undergird the country’s 1964 military coup and inspire similar seizures of power across the region. Framing these two institutions as critical nodes in a global counterrevolutionary network, this paper aims to illuminate the cross-border connections that not only characterized, but facilitated the emergence of, military rule.