Did Guatemala err by reducing its army? Share This /

Guatemalan Army "Kaibiles" complete a training course. (Source: government of Guatemala.)

“[Interior Minister Carlos] Menocal attributes the country’s increase in narcotrafficking to the fact that during the administration of President Óscar Berger, who governed the country between 2004 and 2007, ‘the Army was reduced by 66%, not by 33% like the [1996] peace accords mandated.’”

“‘I never imagined that the armed conflict had protected the country,’ President Colom said in a recent interview. ‘The guerrillas never got involved in drug trafficking. And then we reduced the military and the police.’”

“Guatemala’s army remains weak and underfunded, limiting its ability to echo Mexico’s war on traffickers. Peace accords in 1996 that ended 36 years of fighting between leftist rebels and government forces ordered the army be slashed in size, dwindling from a 50,000-strong force to just 17,000 soldiers today. Dozens of military bases, including one in Alta Verapaz, were closed.”

 

The first quote is from BBC Mundo in December. The second is from the Wall Street Journal in February. The third is from Reuters in January.

We hear this a lot: Guatemala wouldn’t be so terribly violent and dominated by organized crime today if it still had a really big military. In this narrative, reducing Guatemala’s army to its current strength of about 16,000-17,000 members was a grave mistake.

That’s a terrible misreading of what’s going on in Guatemala.

• Cutting back the Army wasn’t a mistake. The big mistake was not increasing the police to fill the gap. Guatemala’s police are supposed to be in charge of public security and investigating crimes. But the roughly 20,000-person National Civilian Police are in even worse shape than the Army. The force is badly underfunded and riven with corruption.

  After Guatemala’s civil war ended in 1996, one of the priorities was to create a new police force, but it didn’t really happen. A force heavily composed of old officers was retrained by Spain’s Civil Guard, and other donors did little else. There is now “one police officer for every 700 residents - compared with the one for every 400 recommended by the United Nations,” that Wall Street Journal piece reminds us.

  Guatemala’s police need to start over — and when President Oscar Berger reduced the army’s ranks by nearly half in 2004, his government erred only by not using the resulting savings on the police and the justice system.

• Fighting organized crime is not what an army does. Armies are for defeating an enemy using overwhelming violence. Police are for protecing populations using minimal force. The only advantage that a big army would have is that it would be big, and more easily deployable.

  Armies can carry out massive sweeps and displays of firepower. This is rarely what you want happening around your own citizens. Instead, police can do what is really needed here: detective work to unravel criminal networks, handling evidence, working with informants and witnesses, and building cases in concert with the justice system. Armies don’t do that.

• It’s wrong to assume that Guatemala’s army would be less susceptible to corruption. In fact, there is reason to worry that top army officers, and members of elite units like the Kaibiles special forces, are already linked to organized crime.

• Guatemala’s army has never been held to account for human rights crimes. Its members went unpunished for killing tens of thousands during the 1960-1996 civil war, and it underwent no fundamental reforms. Would soldiers behave similarly if massively sent out of the barracks again, back among the population, to go fight drug cartels?