The military in Latin America has been extensively involved in pandemic relief operations. This paper analyses the impact of militarization of pandemic relief operations on human rights. It argues that not all militarization is equally harmful to individuals in the region. When troops assume responsibilities regarding medical care and logistical support, human rights violations do not follow. When involved in policing the stay-at-home orders, the extent of human rights violations is explained by the level of operational autonomy the military has in public security operations. The more autonomous the military, more likely abuses are to occur. Additionally, military exposure to judicial prosecution for human rights offenses contributes to the explanation. After gathering original empirical evidence from 14 Latin American democracies on military presence in pandemic relief, we draw our inferences from process tracing on four comparative case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador.
Militaries are commonly deployed in response to domestic disasters. However, our understanding of this phenomenon remains incomplete, partly because the particulars of disasters make it hard to generalize about deployments used in response. This article leverages the COVID-19 pandemic's global reach to systematically evaluate common hypotheses about when and how militaries are used to respond to domestic disasters. It presents original global data about domestic military deployments in pandemic response and uses it to assess common theoretical expectations about what shapes whether and how militaries are used in such contexts. The results suggest that decisions about whether to deploy militaries stem from the securitization of domestic disaster relief rather than being responses to specific disaster-related features, state capacity shortcomings, or other social or political factors, even as some of these elements shaped how militaries were used. The article concludes by outlining some hypotheses for future research about the impact of this securitization on civil-military relations.
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