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This article deals with the politics of military intervention and withdrawal in South America. The main argument is that a situation of "military structural unemployment" is at the root of both the military interventions in South American politics and the problems involved in the recent "liberalization" tendencies which are appearing among authori tarian military governments in that part of the continent. It is our contention that the doctrine of internal national security has given the military the ideological justification for taking over and retaining power for more than a decade, but also that it has failed to give them the instruments for institutionalizing a new social and political order in which they could find a clear identity. The military in several South American countries communicate more and more with each other, establishing, better than any other elite group, linkages across borders in political terms.

Notwithstanding the statements from the judiciary, within little more than a decade the executive branch of the United States government consolidated the old, and added several new, foundations for military intervention in the United States. It would be idle for a legal scholar to speculate whether any edifice of oppression is likely to be built upon these foundations, whether soon or later in time. A sufficient task for the legal scholar is to disclose that the foundations, although faulty, indeed are there; to explain how those foundations came to be laid; and, to show that they have no footing on the bedrock of our law.

The Military Intervention by Powerful States (MIPS) project develops a rigorous, generalizable measure of the effectiveness of military force as a policy instrument and applies the measure to code the outcomes of all military interventions conducted by five major powers since the termination of World War II. The MIPS dataset provides detailed data on US, British, Chinese, French, and Russian uses of military force against both state and non-state targets between 1946 and 2003. In particular, this project focuses on the political objectives strong states pursue through the use of force, the human and material cost of their military operations, and measures of intervention outcomes relative to the intervening states' objectives. The dataset also includes extensive data on factors commonly hypothesized to be associated with war outcomes, such as the nature of the target, the type of force used by the intervening state, and military aid and assistance provided to each side.

This article examines the effect of foreign armed intervention on human rights conditions in target countries. It is argued that military intervention contributes to the rise of state repression by enhancing the state's coercive power and encouraging more repressive behavior, especially when it is supportive or neutral toward the target government. Results from bivariate probit models estimated on time-series cross-section data show that supportive and neutral interventions increase the likelihood of extrajudicial killing, disappearance, political imprisonment, and torture. Hostile interventions increase only the probability of political imprisonment. The involvement of an intergovernmental organization or a liberal democracy as an intervener is unlikely to make any major difference in the suggested negative impact of intervention. Adapted from the source document.