The modern US defense role in the Western Hemisphere is framed by the terms of the 1947 Rio Treaty, the 1948 Charter of the Organization of America States (OAS), and subsequent bilateral and multilateral protocols like that creating the 1982 Regional Security System (RSS) in the Eastern Caribbean. As components of a collective security system that was explicitly anti-communist in design and intention, the Rio Treaty and its successor documents were established to combat threats posed either by direct aggression on the part of the Soviet Union and/or of Soviet-sponsored, Marxist-Leninist infiltration in the region. These represented the mainstay of the US-Latin American strategic alliance for over 40 years. Most importantly, the orientation of the Inter-American Defense System (IADS) fostered the notion that, within the embrace of the US strategic nuclear and conventional umbrella, military threats to the Western Hemisphere would originate primarily from within, aided and abetted from abroad by the communist alliance. This belief in, and fear of, internal enemies became an enduring theme in modern Latin American geopolitical thought, even when sharing space with traditional external defense concerns (Child, 1985).

During the last two decades, military rulers have been replaced by democratically elected civilian governments throughout Latin America. Nevertheless, scholars (Mainwaring et al., 1992:3,8) contend that nearly all contemporary Latin American polities remain unconsolidated democratic regimes principally because civilian control over the armed forces has not yet been established. Although the armed forces have returned to their barracks, they have retained considerable political and institutional autonomy. A number of scholars (Loveman, 1994; Agüero, 1992; and others) emphasize that most Latin American constitutions still recognize the military's right to intervene when the constitutional order is threatened. The armed forces are also generally granted broad jurisdiction over internal security, as well as the freedom to organize their institution without civilian interference. There is a considerable body of opinion which maintains that fears of military intervention continue to constrain the behavior of civilian politicians and social groups (Valenzuela, 1992; O'Donnell and Schmitter, 1986; Rouquié, 1986; and Rial, 1990).

The armed conflict that wracked El Salvador from 1980 to the signing of the Peace Accords in January 1992 began and ended in a still unresolved struggle over civil society: over what expression civil society would be allowed to take, over its influence in public debate, over who would control it, and how. If the Right fought to protect its own economic power, it fought first of all on the ground of civil society, attempting by all means available to subordinate, or subdue, the forces unleashed via the wave of organizing by church groups, unions, and the Left in the 1960s (Baloyra, 1982; Lungo U., 1987; Montgomery, 1995). The targets of the famous “death squads,” which emerged well before the eruption of civil war in 1981, were preponderantly representatives of organized civil society: union leaders, teachers, community organizers, health workers, catechists. While political militants have been the most prominent among recent victims of the violence carried out by resurgent death squads, the struggle going on in El Salvador today is essentially a struggle over the character and direction of the new civil society that has arisen in the wake of the war and the Peace Accords.

From one of the poorest countries in Europe in the late 1950s, Spain emerged as a middle industrial power by the time of the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975. Subsequently, under the leadership of King Juan Carlos I, Franco's successor as chief of state, Spain negotiated a smooth transition from authoritarianism to a parliamentary-monarchy. On the first of January 1986, the Iberian nation acceded to full membership in the European Community (EC). However, prior to this date and independently of the EC (now the European Union), the Spanish state had already set in motion, in 1981, two great undertakings related to Latin America: (1) the commemoration of Columbus' fateful voyage to the New World in 1492 and (2) the formation of an “Iberoamerican Community of Nations.”