SOUTH AMERICA:
Is There an Arms Race? Analysts Disagree

Gustavo González*


SANTIAGO,  (IPS) - Experts on security matters interviewed by IPS correspondents in South America disagree on whether planned weapons purchases by several countries indicate the start of an arms race.

While several of the analysts said the concerns about a military build-up could turn out to be much ado about nothing, others pointed to the resurgence of longstanding border disputes and to U.S. strategies for increasing Washington's influence in the region.

Several of the experts also noted that it is not enough to acquire sophisticated weaponry without the necessary technological and human resources.

Chile, which over the next two years will acquire ten F-16 fighter jets from the United States and four warships from the Netherlands, is accused of fuelling an arms race, by its neighbours Bolivia and Peru, and by the daily newspaper Granma, the official mouthpiece of Cuba's governing Communist Party.

In a mid-March survey by the University of Lima, 77 percent of those interviewed in the Peruvian capital said Chile is caught up in an arms race, while 48.5 percent said an armed conflict with Chile was ''likely'' and 32.9 percent said it was ''unlikely''.

Worries about the possibility of war in that part of South America have to do with the border disputes left simmering by the War of the Pacific (1879-1883), in which Peru lost the province of Tarapacá to Chile, and Bolivia lost the province of Antofagasta, which made it a landlocked country.

Since then, impoverished Bolivia has never ceased to demand that Chile grant it an outlet to the Pacific Ocean.

According to 60 percent of the respondents in the Lima survey, the government of Alejandro Toledo should invest even more in weapons, despite the fact that Peru already plans to purchase two used warships from Italy this year and two more in 2006, and is negotiating a 250 million dollar loan from the Russian Federation to repair and upgrade its air force fleet.

In Colombia, meanwhile, President Alvaro Uribe reached an agreement with Spain early this year for the purchase of 46 tanks. But the deal, approved by Spain's former prime minister José María Aznar, may still be cancelled by the new Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

A professor at the University of Los Andes in Bogota, an expert in security questions who preferred not to be identified, said ''the Spanish tanks and howitzers will be clearly aimed at (Venezuelan President Hugo) Chávez.''

A diplomatic source said the U.S. government proposed the sale to Aznar. If true, that would support the argument that the aim is to intimidate Chávez, who has close ties to Cuban President Fidel Castro and is an outspoken opponent of the policies of the George W. Bush administration.

But retired general Manuel José Bonett, a former commander of Colombia's armed forces, sees the planned arms deal in a different light: ''Venezuela has not expressed any concern. I heard Chávez say he thought it would be a good thing for Colombia to place those tanks along the border, which is a shared asset.''

For its part, Brazil is considering purchases to upgrade its air and navy fleets. But that does not seem to worry its three partners in the Mercosur (Southern Common Market) trade bloc: Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.

''There is no arms race in South America,'' said retired army colonel Gerardo Cavagnan, a researcher in the Strategic Studies Department at the University of Campinas, located 100 km from Sao Paulo.

''Chile is not re-arming itself, but merely renovating its air fleet, just as Brazil is doing, because its old Mirage bombers are turning into junk,'' he said.

Argentine analyst Rosendo Fraga agreed. ''I don't share the view that there is a military build-up in South America. On the contrary, this is the region that spends the smallest portion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence in the world, and although in that context Chile spends more than the rest, that does not mean there is an arms race.''

Fraga, a lawyer and journalist, is one of the lead researchers at the New Majority Studies Centre in Argentina, which provided IPS with a draft of the study 'Balance militar de América del Sur' (an overview of military spending in South America), which offers comparative global and regional statistics (see tables).

Santiago Escobar, a researcher at Chile's Institute of International Strategic and Security Studies, said that in order to talk about an arms race, it is necessary to look at spending over a given time period, and not just specific purchases to renovate equipment like the ones currently in the pipeline in South America.

Still, Escobar believes that ''Chile has spent excessively'' on defence, in what he described as an ''overdose of weapons without upgrading operational capacities.''

The F-16 fighter jets represent ''a question of prestige'' for the air force, which has not, however, invested in the needed communications infrastructure or other necessary elements, he said.

Each time a sophisticated fighter jet takes off it costs Chilean taxpayers 3,000 dollars, and optimal training conditions for flying the jets would involve at least 16 flight hours a week by two crews, which is beyond the reach of the military budget of any Latin American country, even Chile's relatively large budget, said Escobar.

He underlined that although Chile has the largest per capita military budget in South America, it is necessary to keep in mind that Chilean defence expenditure figures include the pensions of retired military personnel, which in other countries fall under the budgets of other ministries.

Sociologist Raúl Gonzales, a civilian expert on security in Peru, said his country and Chile are initiating an arms race, which President Toledo will not be able to avoid, despite the critical financial situation faced by his government, ''out of fear of a reaction from his own armed forces.''

Gonzales said the United States has assigned Chile ''the role of regional 'defender of order' along the Pacific,'' which would reinforce the Southern Cone country's tendency to have a strong military, long fomented by historical, geopolitical and economic factors.

Retired Peruvian navy captain Luis Mellet told the Lima daily La Razón in January that Chile needs energy and water to develop the northern part of the country -- resources it lacks but which are abundant in neighbouring regions of Bolivia and Peru.

Gonzales and historian Julio del Carpio, a retired Peruvian army colonel, argue that the objectives of Chile's supposed military build-up include the aim of protecting the country's economic expansion. ''Chile's investments in Peru run to 3.7 billion dollars, while Peru has invested less than 20 million dollars in Chile,'' del Carpio pointed out.

Joaquín Rivery, a columnist for Granma, wrote on Apr. 7 that the U.S. interest in arming Chile, its ''unconditional ally'', is growing as a result of the ''explosion of social conflicts in Latin America.''

Behind what it called ''the re-arming of Chile'', the Cuban Communist Party newspaper sees a supposed aim by Washington to encourage the creation of ''a powerful right flank (as seen from the north) in Mercosur'' (of which Chile is an associate member), with a view to making the South American bloc part of ''a single economic and war machine'' guided by Washington.

Other analysts (see SOUTH AMERICA: Arms Control Initiatives Face Big Challenges) stressed Washington's worries about continued political and social instability in war-torn Colombia, and future outbreaks in Bolivia -- not so much due to its demand for an outlet to the sea, but because of the influence of the country's growing popular movement, which toppled a president closely allied with the United States last October.

* (Abraham Lama in Peru, Mario Osava in Brazil, Marcela Valente in Argentina and Constanza Vieira in Colombia contributed to this report).