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REGION: PUBLIC SECURITY WITH HUMAN RIGHTS GUARANTEES-- CHALLENGES IN GUATEMALA AND EL SALVADOR.

Article Excerpt
By William D. Stanley

Associate Professor of Political Science, UNM

This week's first-round presidential election in Guatemala, and preparations for the January elections in El Salvador, highlight the remarkable political and electoral transformations that have accompanied the end of civil wars in both countries. Equally important are the less internationally visible changes in the permanent apparatus of the state, particularly shifts in the role of the armed forces, justice systems, and police.

Police institutions in particular affect the daily lives of citizens. As criminologist David Bayley puts it, "The police are to government as the edge is to the knife."(1) Until the negotiated civil-war settlements, militaries in both countries controlled domestic police forces, using them as tools of political repression as well as platforms for organized criminal activity. The militarized police institutions were brutal, corrupt, and ineffective in fighting crime.

The National Police in El Salvador ran the largest death squad in the nation in the early 1980s, while the Treasury Police and National Guard also carried out thousands of disappearances and overt acts of repression. The Guatemalan police and Treasury Guard were not as central to the repressive apparatus, but played a significant role nonetheless and were institutionally weakened by their subordination to the military. As part of their peace processes, both El Salvador and Guatemala replaced these military-controlled security forces with new National Civilian Police (Policia Nacional Civil, PNC) forces.

In this context of demilitarization, political opening, and state reform, individual citizens have sometimes faced greater insecurity than during the wars. In El Salvador, the annual rate of violent death for civilians in the first few years of peace was higher than it had been during the war (2). Guatemala, too, faced postwar increases in some kinds of crime, most notably armed robbery, kidnapping, rape, and property crimes. Opinion surveys in both countries reflect public alarm about violent crime and considerable support for iron-fisted responses by the state.

These contradictory trends--political liberalization accompanied by increased individual insecurity--raise a significant question for Central Americans as well as for international agencies that hope to promote democracy in the region: Can effective public security be provided by public institutions that respect human rights, or is some more authoritarian solution required? As Brown University political scientist Charles Call has pointed out, "International analysts generally regard the country's police reforms as the most successful postconflict...

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