American trends in warfare and major violence (1950-2012)

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involvement in the Falkland Wars which has previously been discussed in regard to the role of the U.K. All further episodes of international warfare visible in Figure VI-9 took place after the year 2000 and related to the U.S. involvement in the War on Terror, most notably in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Figure VI-9 Clustered magnitude scores of warfare in the Americas (1950-2012)

Elaboration by the author; Data source: Center for Systemic Peace

As far as civil warfare in the Americas is regarded, a cluster throughout the 1950s became visible. Most of this violence referred to occurrences in Colombia, namely a conflict between the Conservative and the Liberal Party which is commonly known as “La Violencia”. The war was fought between paramilitary and guerilla groups affiliated with either one of the aforementioned parties or the Communist party for that matter, and resulted in more than 200,000 casualties (cf. Sánchez and Bakewell 1985). Next to “La Violencia”, the tips visible in the magnitude scores for civil warfare between 1957 and 1959 related to the guerilla episode of the Cuban revolution (cf. Guevara 1996) which ended with the establishment of a socialist government in Cuba.

The extended episode of ethnic warfare in the Americas revealed in Figure VI-9 lasted from 1966 until 1996 and linked to the Guatemalan Civil War. This episode is also apparent in Figure VI-10 which shows the magnitude scores of warfare occurring in the Americas disaggregated by sub-regions. Central America reached the highest values among all sub-regions.

Historiographically, the onset of the Guatemalan Civil War occurred in 1960 with a failed

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revolt by left-leaning military personnel against the Guatemalan government. This led to a continuous insurgency by a wide-ranging armed left-wing movement against the Guatemalan state. After U.S. intelligence entities had gotten involved and Guatemalan counterinsurgency measures became increasingly robust, an escalation set in in 1966. With more than 40%, Guatemala has one of the largest indigenous populations in Latin America, much of the violence was concentrated in rural areas. Guatemala’s state apparatus, on the other hand, had long been in the hands of European descendants which lent a strong ethnic dimension to the conflict. Until the ending of the war in 1996, an estimated 200,000 people had lost their lives (cf. Wilkinson 2004).

Figure VI-10 Clustered magnitude scores of warfare in American subregions (1950-2012)

Elaboration by the author; Data source: Center for Systemic Peace

Further variations in the Central American warfare magnitude scores became apparent for the second half of the 1970s and were related to the previously discussed Nicaraguan revolution and the civil war in El Salvador. Figure VI-9 reveals that unlike the Guatemalan Civil War, these wars did not show a strong ethnic dimension and were therefore classified as civil warfare.

VI.1.3.2. Major violence in the Americas

Moving away from warfare, it became apparent that international forms of conflict played a comparatively larger role in other episodes of major violence in the Americas. Up until the mid-1970s, most major violence in the Americas was indeed international before civil conflict

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became the dominating category for the remainder of the observation period. Major ethnic violence other than warfare appeared to play only a minor role and was limited to four years of intensified conflict in Mexico, namely revolutionary and counterrevolutionary action surrounding the armed activities of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (cf. Haar 2005).

Figure VI-11 Clustered magnitude scores of violence other than warfare in the Americas (1950-2012)

Elaboration by the author; Data source: Center for Systemic Peace

Up until the end of the Cold War, almost all of the international violence depicted in Figure VI-11 related in one way or the other to U.S. involvement in political struggles in Latin America. This began with the installment of a military dictatorship in Guatemala in the 1950s, attempts to turn back the Cuban revolution in the 1960s, and heavy involvement in the aforementioned political conflicts in Central America in the 1980s. Especially the U.S.

involvement in Nicaragua, and also in particular the Iran-Contra affair (Barak 1991, 6), have been studied by criminologists as examples of state crime (Rothe 2009). U.S. interventionism in Latin American had long been a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy, most notably outlined in the so-called Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (cf. Ricard 2006; also see Dent 1999) and later as containment policies to counter the spread of communism (Schoultz 2014, 106). The U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 which itself has been studied as state crime (Johns and Johnson 1994), marked in a certain sense the end of this interventionism. Even before the Panama intervention, however, some scholars (e.g. Bagley 1988) had argued that the U.S.-led war on drugs had taken over as a new form of U.S. interventionism in Latin America. In any

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case, with the end of the Cold War, a relative decline in international violence in the Americas became apparent. Throughout the 1990s there was only one occurrence of international violence, the so-called Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru (Cooper 2003). Due to its limited impact, and despite its name, it has not been characterized as a war and therefore shows up as major violence and not as warfare in Figure VI-11. Further incidents of international violence regarded the September 11^th attacks on the World Trade Center, violence linking to the U.S.-led War on Terror, but also the U.S. engagement in the Mexican Drug War.

Figure VI-12 Clustered magnitude scores of violence other than warfare in American subregions (1950-2012)

Elaboration by the author; Data source: Center for Systemic Peace

In spite of its international dimension, much of the violence linked to the Mexican Drug War was counted as civil violence and regarded both the struggle between the Mexican state and drug cartels as well as inter- and intra-cartel violence. In addition to that, civil violence in the Americas included wide-ranging forms of conflict in a plethora of countries. This included political as much as criminal struggles, for example gang and cartel violence in Central America. However, most civil violence was attributable to South America, as Figure VI-12 reveals. This regarded, in particular, the long-ongoing conflict between the Colombian government and the FARC, an infamous armed revolutionary movement spelled out as Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (cf. Leech 2011). The conflict between the FARC and the Colombian government had been going on since the 1960s but became more intense at the beginning of the 1980s when the influx of drug money allowed the FARC to upgrade its

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capabilities for combat (cf. Vargas 1999; Norman 2017). The FARC dissolved in 2017 and is currently disarming.