The wrong answer to a tough question, part 4

Here are the final three of my Top 5 Reasons why former members of the Guatemalan army shouldn't be hired as a supplemental police force:

3. Spending money in all the wrong places

The government intends to spend 12 million dollars on this program during its first year of operation. At least the funds will come out of the military budget. Kinda. Ok, not really.

According to an article in Siglo XXI:

Army spokesperson Orlando Archila explained that "since the Ministry of Defense will be doing the hiring, the salaries will come out of the Defense budget." But then he added that since these salaries weren't included in the Defense budget, the Ministry of Finance will have to "reimburse" them.

The Human Rights ombudsman, Sergio Morales, questioned the operation and the funding. He stated: "We have heard that there will be a multi-million dollar expenditure for the incorporation of these people, when these same funds should be used to strengthen and dignify the work of the Police."

So there's the catch: every cent spent on this temporary band-aid band of soldiers is a cent not being invested in strengthening the police force with more officers, better training, decent salaries, and modern equipment.

4. Fears from the recent, dark past

While the men and women who are hired for this paramilitary force may be dedicated and well-intentioned, there is no denying the emotional and psychological impact that the specter of patrolling soldiers could have for the victims of the armed conflict... especially in the rural areas of Guatemala.

As my co-worker Erwin Perez wrote in an analysis for Incidencia Democrática:

The participation of ex-military in "securing the streets", awakens fears in that part of the civilian population which suffered, with their own flesh and blood, the counterinsurgent repression unleashed by the military during the internal armed conflict. The wounds are still too fresh to forget the atrocities committed by the military against civilian communities under the pretext of "defending the country".

It is telling sign when the military itself goes out of its way to assure that the these new soldier-cops will be trained in Human Rights as well as Police techniques. (The army doth protest too much, methinks.)

A mere ten years have passed since then end of after a brutal 36-year civil war, where 200,000 people were killed and over a million displaced from their homes. In this post-war era, the government should be constructing a small, modern, professional army dedicated exclusively to external defense... as defined by the Peace Accords.

Re-hiring and re-arming ex-soldiers to patrol and police the cities and countryside... well, that's just heading in the wrong direction.

5. The Dandelion Effect

For those of you who didn't grow up in the suburbs, the dandelion is a dastardly weed, difficult to control. Oh sure, you can mow your lawn and make it look as if you've rid yourself of the problem, but as long as those roots lurk untouched and underground... the dandelions will return, and most likely spread.

Dressing ex-soldiers up as police is like plucking at dandelion heads: it may look as if you're making a difference, but you aren't. To begin to really tackle the enormously complex problem of crime and violence in Guatemala, you have to look deeper... at the roots.

As Bernd Debusmann write in his article "Guatemala swept by vigilante killings in crime backlash":

Seasoned human rights experts say that no amount of force, by vigilantes, death squads, or the state, will end the violence now sweeping Guatemala (and to a lesser extent El Salvador and Honduras) as long as governments fail to address the root causes -- poverty, lack of education, lack of jobs, lack of prospects.

Development indicators by the United Nations have long placed Guatemala near the bottom of the list in Latin America. More than half the country‘s 12 million people live in poverty and 2.5 million in extreme poverty -- a condition an aid worker here defined as "being too poor to afford shoes and too poor to send your kid to school."

In an interview Sergio Morales, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman, sums it up well:

"The best weapon for combating all of our adversities is to give the Guatemalan population the opportunity for human development. If the social conditions in which we live are not transformed, crime and all the other evils will continue spinning their web and ensnaring the entire country. Which is why we must combat the root causes of these problems."

Obviously this is a complex issue that will require complex solutions. What cannot be allowed, however, is for this moment of crisis to be used as a pretext for militarizing the Civilian National Police, or the country in general.

The Guatemalan people deserve a better answer to this tough question!

Tags: Guatemala, Military, Police, Morales, Poverty

Posted by elcanche at February 24, 2006 11:58 PM