Latin American and Caribbean countries have been spending increasing amounts on their militaries, both on and off the budget books, according to a new think tank report. While this raises concerns about democratic accountability, at the same time, the trend does not appear to have affected social services in most cases.
The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found that overall the Latin American states it surveyed have improved on the transparency of their military spending by making information on defense budgets accessible to the public.
However, it added, “Further transparency is needed in the reporting of off-budget funding for arms acquisitions.”
“The information available in many states leaves important questions open regarding exactly what is being spent and why,” said report co-author Carina Solmirano, in a press release.
From 2003 onward, Latin American countries have increased defense spending by an average of 8.5 percent per year, reaching nearly $70 billion in 2010, according to the think tank.
The reasons for big military budgets seem to be largely domestic rather than external. “The threat of interstate conflict in the region has been virtually nonexistent for some time,” says the report. Yet for some countries, particularly Mexico, Colombia, and Peru, internal armed conflicts between government forces, drug cartels, and paramilitary groups have been commonplace, with a large amount of organized crime throughout Central America.
At the same time, poverty and social inequality are still rampant in the region. Thus the increase in military expenditure “has raised concern in some quarters that scarce resources are being unnecessarily diverted from other [and] civilian budgetary priorities,” the report stated.
Despite the concerns, the available data does not prove that the more a government spends on arms, the less it spends on education and health care—cornerstones of long-term economic development.
“Most Latin American countries seem to be maintaining or increasing health and education spending despite rising military budgets,” said Dr. Sam Perlo-Freeman, who heads the SIPRI Military Expenditure Project.
The notable exceptions to this are Chile and Ecuador where military spending is outstripping spending on those important social programs.
And in Venezuela and Cuba, assessments were harder to make because of a lack of information. “Cuba’s military spending is highly opaque, with only an aggregated total available for a few years of the period,” reads the report.
Overall, the authors conclude unless transparency improves, there will always be questions as to whether resources are being used according to popular will.
