ABSTRACT
The differentiation of society into classes is essentially responsible for the development and constancy of the state military organisation. The relation of class forces is the primary social determinant of the historical types and forms of military organisation. The democratic social characteristics of the armed forces of the bourgeois revolution vanished once the bourgeoisie established itself as the ruling class. State military organisations can be militarised to varying degrees. The officer corps was exclusively recruited from the ranks of that class and, consequently, promptly reacted to any attempt to change the existing state of affairs in any Latin American society. The possibility that a state military organisation or the protagonists of militarisation may become allenated from the ruling class is objectified in social situations in which there is a balance of forces of the main social classes, thus preventing any one class from becoming the dominant socio-political factor.
