Cardona
MPSA 2004
2
in Latin America. And perhaps the issue of susceptibility to armed challenge from below
is one that is taking on increased relevance for Latin America.
This dissertation research that this papers grows out of seeks to argue that the
period in which we should look at the trade-off between forestalling coup and foreclosing
revolution is relatively well-defined in Latin American history. The contention is that the
period in question—1880 to 1920—constitutes a “critical juncture” in Latin American
political development. During this period, Latin American republics confronted a
fundamental dilemma of constitutional governance: how to empower state forces to
ensure domestic security without giving them so much power that they become a threat to
that security. The choices made during this period with respect to institutional design
reverberated throughout the mid-20
th
century, until at least the onset of the Cold War,
when geopolitical considerations led many countries to redesign and repurpose their
militaries around a doctrine of “national security” (Leal Buitrago 1994).
To explore this question, I begin with a “difficult case,” one in which the threats
of coup and revolution were for many years not alternatives but coeval, and in which the
issue of internal security has long been contested and salient: Colombia. The period
between 1930 and 1958, in which the country underwent a series of episodes that
challenged the stability of the political regime in various ways, allows us to explore the
role of the institutional design of the public forces in influencing regime stability. During
this period, the Colombian regime experience both a (stalled) revolution and a (truncated)
coup in which different elements of the public forces were key actors. By exploring the
consequences of specific choices about the design of the public forces for the types of
Convention