Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM)

Center for Advanced Military Studies (CAEM), a Peruvian institution for specialized higher military education created in 1950 under the rule of the de facto president General Manuel Odría. Its original objectives were to define national war doctrines, train Peruvian colonels aspiring to higher military posts, and relate the issues of national defense to national problems. It was similar in scope to contemporary military centers in France, the United States (Inter-American Defense College), Argentina, and Brazil.

Peruvian military training and education had been modeled since 1896 on the French military school (in part as a reaction to the German model used by the Chilean army at the time). The French model perceived the role of the military in a wider social and administrative dimension. With this perspective the Peruvian general Oscar Torres, President José Luis Bustamante y Rivero's minister of war, called as early as 1945 for the establishment of a specialized military training institution.

The CAEM's graduates and teaching staff began a gradual transformation in the military mentality toward a "new professionalism." They favored institutional military intervention in matters of national development, Indian "integration," and diminished foreign dependency. The CAEM played an important role in the military suppression of the peasant uprisings in Cuzco in the early 1960s through "civic action." In Cuzco the military introduced the first land reform ever executed in Peru in order to avoid further insurrections.

It has been assumed that the CAEM had a decisive influence among those who supported the 1968 military coup led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado against constitutional President Fernando Belaúnde. While some supporters of Velasco were CAEM graduates (such as General Jorge Fernández Maldonado), recent studies point to the much more important bearing of concepts of strategic internal and external defense (rather than the CAEM's developmental doctrines) expounded by the newly expanded military intelligence.

See alsoArmed Forces .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (1978).

Daniel Masterson, Militarism and Politics in Latin America: Peru from Sánchez Cerro to Sendero Luminoso (1991).

Additional Bibliography

Masterson, Daniel M. Fuerza armada y sociedad en el Perú moderno: Un estudio sobre relaciones civiles militares, 1930–2000. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Estratégicos, 2001.

                              Alfonso W. Quiroz