Enter 9/11: Latin America and the Global War on Terror

Markus-Michael Müller

doi:10.1017/s0022216x20000565

Abstract

AbstractThis article offers an analysis of the transnational discursive construction processes informing Latin American security governance in the aftermath of 9/11. It demonstrates that the Global War on Terror provided an opportunity for external and aligned local knowledge producers in the security establishments throughout the Americas to reframe Latin America's security problems through the promotion of a militarised security epistemology, and derived policies, centred on the region's ‘convergent threats’. In tracing the discursive repercussions of this epistemic reframing, the article shows that, by tapping into these discourses, military bureaucracies throughout the Americas were able to overcome their previous institutional marginalisation vis-à-vis civilian agencies. This development contributed to the renaissance of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism discourses and policies in the region, allowing countries such as Colombia and Brazil to reposition themselves globally by exporting their military expertise for confronting post-9/11 threats beyond the region.

Highlights

This article addresses the transformation of Latin America’s security environment in the aftermath of 9/11 in order to explain the resurgence of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency-related discourses and policies in the region
From the mid-2000s onwards, this subgroup – with close links to many of the previously mentioned outlets of the post-9/11 ‘counter-terrorism/counter-insurgency industry’, and often with direct work experiences regarding Latin American security issues – discursively reconfigured policy framings of the region’s crime problems that fuelled the above-mentioned ‘threat-based’ policy view on Latin America
You solve the problem.’158 Likewise, the troops involved in the federal intervention, many of which participated in MINUSTAH, trained the local police forces based on a course that was similar to the training that MINUSTAH troops received prior to their deployment, thereby deepening the counter-insurgency outlook of local security governance by familiarising police officers with the post-9/11 security epistemology that informed EB-20-MC-10.217 and MINUSTAH’s anti-gang operations in Port-au-Prince

Summary

Introduction

This article addresses the transformation of Latin America’s security environment in the aftermath of 9/11 in order to explain the resurgence of counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency-related discourses and policies in the region. These communities managed to promote a post–9/11 security worldview that discursively connects the issues of insurgency and terrorism by stressing the connections between these phenomena, on the one hand, and relating them to crime, on the other In making this security epistemology, gravitating around concepts such as the crime–terror–insurgency nexus, travel to Latin America, these communities adapted its underlying threat scenario and policy prescriptions to the region’s realties by reframing criminal actors, such as street gangs, as terrorists and/or insurgents, as well as placing them in a global post-9/11 context

Travelling Epistemologies

Epistemological Resonances

Embracing the Nexus

Doctrinal Entanglements

Conclusion