Guatemala Argentina Connection

A friend recently sent me an interesting editorial from the Argentine newspaper Página 12 that I wanted to share with you all. You can read the full article (in Spanish) here. The article neatly dovetails into my own research, and reinforced for me the reason why this topic is so interesting. The reference (for those of you keeping track) is: Natanson, José. "Inseguridad y política." Página 12 January 23, 2011. I should note here that the word inseguridad literally translates to "insecurity," but not in the way that most of us think of insecurity. This is not the idea that someone is not confident in themselves. Here, insecurity means not safe. There is probably a better way to translate this word so that this meaning of "not safe" comes through, but for the sake of time I'll keep using "insecurity."

To introduce the topic, Natanson writes, "Last week's episodes of insecurity reactivated the debate over lowering the age of criminal responsibility...and the laws that apply to [minors]. Like a plague, this topic disappears and reappears from time to time, with nuances that change according to the moment and the political-electoral debate." Already, I like where this is going. Not, of course, that there was some kind of crime that shocked the country. Apparently, Governor of the Province of Buenos Aires brought up the issue of lowering the age of criminal responsibility in the aftermath of a highly publicized murder committed by a fifteen year old. What I like about this is that Natanson is expressing something that I'm trying to talk about in my dissertation: that support of "iron fist" policies, such as lowering the age of criminal responsibility, comes and goes and often has to do with elections.

The article goes on to talk about the fact that, first and foremost, lowering the age of criminal responsibility has not been proven to have any impact on crime. He connects this policy with the zero tolerance policies of Giuliani in New York (rightly so) and points out many of the reasons why the apparent success of these policies disappear when you take a closer look--the reduction of crime in New York may have had more to do with rising economic prosperity and less to do with zero tolerance. He moves on from New York and travels south to Central America, where iron fist/zero tolerance policies have also been largely futile (and perhaps even counterproductive). Finally, someone else who makes the comparison between Central America and Argentina! He points out that Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras all have low age limits on criminal responsibility (children between 12 and 13 years can be charged with a crime) and have some of the highest homicide rates in the world. It's interesting to see such a comparison between Argentina and Central America. Whenever I talked about my project with (most) Argentines, they were shocked that there were places in Latin America that are more "dangerous" than Buenos Aires (with the possible exception of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil...because everyone has an idea that that city is dangerous, apparently).

But it was the analysis that followed that really drew my attention, and I'm going to do my best to translate it for you  here (please forgive the imperfect syntax, I translated this on the fly):

The politics of security in the province of Buenos Aires, the heart of the problem of insecurity in Argentina,  has been one of the most erratic and dangerous of all those implemented since the return to democracy, as a simple recounting of the ministers [of public security] shows: from León Arslanian to Carlos Ruckauf, passing to Juan Pablo Cafiero, to return again to Arslanian, until we arrive at Carlos Stornelli y Ricarco Casal. But let's break it down. It's necessary but relatively easy to debate against the defenders of penal poplulism; what is harder is to try to understand why progresivism has so many problems taking up the topic and offering if not a solution, then at least a proposal for a solution. The left always preferred to bypass the question of security: except for the two shortened terms of Arslanian in Buenos Aires and the applied focus of Hermes Binner when he assumed the governorship of Santa Fe, there are practically no relevant experiences of progressive politics of security. The fact that Kirchnerism, which has made change one of the keys to its political success, has taken seven years to make a strong showing of its willingness to change things reveals the difficulties of handling this issue. How do we explain this sloth? The logical rejection by the left of the use of repression, any form of repression, generated during the dictatorships, created a vacuum of knowledge that today has become costly. There are few experts that really know about this issue and that have any relationship with the police or some kind of accumulated experience: only a few, like Arslanian or Marcelo Saín, and a handful of institutions like CELS have dedicated themselves to systematically working on the question of security with a focus that is not mano dura (iron fist). 

To this historical rejection we must add a simplistic diagnosis--considering insecurity an automatic subproduct of poverty--which excludes any possibility of resolving this problem in the meantime. To say, as Pino Solanas said in the last electoral campaign, that the principal cause of insecurity is infant mortality is perhaps true, but it contributes little the debate over what to do about young murderers or chop shops or drug trafficking mafias entrenched in the slums, and there does not cease to be in the background the path of ingenious evasion of an issue for which it is difficult to take a concrete position. The problem is...those on the right have constructed an answer, certainly a wrong answer but an answer none the less, that provides a doctrine, a package of measures and all the paraphernalia of foundations and teams ready to apply it. It should not be a surprise that they are the ones that are ahead in the public debate.

However, here is a fact that is difficult to fit in this column. Insecurity does not define elections. Felipe Solá was reelected after designating Juan Pablo Cafiero, and Daniel Scioli was elected with an opposing discourse. Aníbal Ibarre was elected without a single proposal on this, and Mauricio Macre could be elected again even though he has not demonstrated great advances in the fight against crime. Insecurity was absent in the Kirchnerist platform in the presidential election of 2007 and despite this, Cristina won easily.  Carlos Ruckauf, the electorally successful case of mano dura most often mentioned, did not get into the 1999 provincial elections because of his promise to shoot thieves but because of electoral alchemy that permitted him to add the votes for Domingo Cavallo, without which he would have lost. This does not imply, of course, that insecurity is not an important social worry, but my hypothesis is that it does not win elections. Not yet.

 And that is what makes crime and insecurity such a fascinating topic for me. Citizens are concerned with crime in both Argentina and Guatemala, despite the huge differences in terms of aggregate levels of homicides, violent crime, etc. This is, of course, partially a matter of perspective. Knowing that Guatemala City can be more dangerous than Buenos Aires in terms of homicide rates does not make a person in Buenos Aires feel safer. But crime as a political issue varies greatly across Latin America. An expert on Venezuela recently told me that Hugo Chavez has made political statements about crime that takes the statement that poverty creates crime to the extreme, becoming an apologist for criminals (in essences saying, look, wouldn't you commit crime, too, if you were living as they do?) and putting off crime control efforts.  I haven't confirmed this myself, but I wouldn't be surprised. But how do you combat crime while still avoiding the repressive measures of past dictatorships and civil wars? Many countries in Latin America have dealt with crime (often labeled as political crime) through violent repression, and the mano dura policies now supported by the right are reminiscent of this brutal past. Populations who lived in terror of being picked up by military patrols are now supporting the return of military patrols to the streets. How do you get the public to support such efforts? How do you deal with these things in light of impunity, corruption, incompetence, and lack of resources?

*note: The photos of stencils included here were taken by a friend in Buenos Aires in June of 2010. Politically themed stencil graffiti has become a widely used art form, especially in the neighborhood of San Telmo and surrounding areas. The first one reads: "If memory doesn't exist, all that is ours is suicide." The second reads: "Never again?" Both of these are referencing the Dirty War in Argentina that left between 9,000 and 30,000 citizens dead (disappeared) following heavy repression from the military government. I am guessing that this first stencil is referring to the dictatorship even though it does not do so openly because the idea of memory was (and is) a widely discussed topic during the truth commissions investigation, during the trials against military officers for crimes against humanity, and even now that the amnesty given to military officers in the 1990s are now being overturned. The second one refers specifically to a slogan used by activists and human rights groups to support the truth commission charged with investigating the disappearances of political prisoners during the military period. I'm guessing this stencil is making a statement about political repression under democracy, particularly the (rumored) presence of death squads within the police. I included these photos because it brings into focus a very important part of this debate over crime control that is like the white elephant in the room for many: the past history of repressive policing and the blurry line between political and common crime, both in Argentina and in Central America.

Drug Cartels in Guatemala

I wanted to share this article from the Miami Herald with you, dear reader. It tells of the problem of drug cartels in Guatemala, and the turf war between the Zetas, a drug cartel born out of a Mexican army unit, and other Mexican cartels, including the Sinaloa cartel, that have a strong presence in Guatemala. Reports of Mexican drug traffickers moving down into Guatemala is not a new phenomena, but given the recent attention in the US press towards the drug war in Mexico, it makes sense that more outlets are starting to cover the story from the perspective of Guatemala.

The journalist covering this story introduces his piece by describing a Guatemalan friend who "spoke in hushed tones"* about a forced meeting between his family and the Zetas up in the norther department of Petén. Petén is a sparsely populated department covered by jungle that borders Mexico and Belize, and is home to the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, a popular tourist attraction. This story of a wealthy family meeting with drug cartels reminds me of a story I heard while talking with a Guatemalan acquaintance about people's support for harsh policing practices proposed by one of the major political parties, the Patriot Party (Partido Patriota, PP). He told be about how is family used to live on a finca (a large ranch in the countryside) in one of the northern departments. One day he found an envelope full of cash on his doorstep addressed to him. He knew that many of his neighbors had been bullied into allowing drug traffickers to land small airplanes on their land in exchange for envelopes full of cash, and he got nervous. He decided to leave the envelope where it was, and the next day it was gone. But a few days later, another envelope appeared, with more cash. He left this one alone as well, and the pattern continued for weeks. Finally, he received a phone call threatening his wife and his children if he did not take the envelope. He told me that after that phone call, he sold his ranch and moved to the city with his family. He says that now he never lets his wife or his kids leave the house alone. They are always with him or accompanied by a bodyguard. I don't know how much of this story is true--I have no way of verifying it--but it is certainly interesting. I heard it in the summer of 2007, and the stories really haven't changed all that much. The drug cartels still have a relatively free hand (despite President Colom calling a state of siege in the department of Alta Verapaz), and corruption is rampant. To make things more complicated, it seems like at least some of the corruption is due to threats and extortion.

I wanted to point out a few other things in the Miami Herald article. First, interestingly, the writer mentions that, "Faced with such violence, a social movement to demand effective, capable law-enforcement and a transparent, non-corrupt judiciary has yet to emerge from Guatemala's fragile civil society."Which, from all that I've seen, is true. Yes, there are some (very good) NGOs and other activist groups that are focused on public security issues, impunity, police reform, etc., but there hasn't been a social movement to collect these disparate groups together. And I'm not sure (speaking as an outsider) if a cohesive, effective social movement in Guatemala is likely.

Second, the journalist writes,

In Guatemala, the cartels have found a country with a state designed to be weak and ineffective by a rapacious oligarchy. Only 15,000 soldiers and 26,000 police patrol its rugged terrain, though there are more than 100,000 active private security personnel. Scaled down after the country's 1996 peace accords following decades of atrocities, today's numerically small and poorly trained Guatemalan security forces have made way for the armed enforcers of the country's various criminal monarchies.

Is this a roundabout way of blaming the current security crisis on the Peace Accords? I don't think that is the writer's intention, but the paragraph starts to read that way. The Peace Accords scaled back Guatemala's military forces, true. And yes, there are many more private security forces than public security forces (a problem that is, of course, not unique to Guatemala). But is more soldiers on the streets the solution to the drug trafficking problem? The article does not mention, for example, that corruption also pervades the military and the police. But he is right in that they are poorly equipped. I remember reading a newspaper article last year about a request from the National Civil Police to be able to arm themselves with guns confiscated from drug traffickers. We also have to remember, too, that although soldiers are patrolling the streets and fighting drug traffickers, the armed forces are not the same as the police.

Update: there is also an article covering this issue at the Economist that covers not only Guatemala, but also El Salvador and Honduras. There's an interesting map that give homicide rates of each of the Central American countries. Despite the difficulties of using national homicide statistics, given different definitions of homicide (does it include traffic deaths?) and different collection techniques (and the possibility of outright lying), it is still shocking to see the difference between the "northern triangle" countries and the rest of Central America.

*Deibert, Michael. "Caught in the Crossfire." Miami Herald. January 18, 2011.