Civil-Military Relations and Militarization in El Salvador
Masters thesis — Naval Postgraduate School, 2015. Full text: https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA620715
Arguments
Civil-Military Relations and Militarization in El Salvador
It shows the mechanism by which a post-war democracy quietly remilitarizes — when the civilian police can't hold and the army fills the streets, the civil-military bargain reverts without a coup.
Under FMLN president Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), informal civil-military relations produced a largely undemocratic domestic-security response — troops in the streets — and a rising trend of militarization; the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords demobilized the old war but never reintegrated former combatants or rebuilt the economy, leaving transnational gangs and the drug trade as democratic El Salvador's dominant security challenge.
Why it matters
It shows the mechanism by which a post-war democracy quietly remilitarizes — when the civilian police can't hold and the army fills the streets, the civil-military bargain reverts without a coup.
Use when: Informal civil-military relations produce undemocratic security policy — the institution you use for the emergency becomes the institution that defines normal.