Cycles of Police Reform in Latin America

Abstract

Over the last quarter century post-conflict and post-authoritarian transitions in Latin America have been accompanied by a surge in social violence, acquisitive crime, and insecurity. These phenomena have been driven by an expanding international narcotics trade, by the long-term effects of civil war and counter-insurgency (resulting in, inter alia, an increased availability of small arms and a pervasive grammar of violence), and by structural stresses on society (unemployment, hyper-inflation, widening income inequality). Local police forces proved to be generally ineffective in preventing, resolving, or detecting such crime and forms of “new violence”3 due to corruption, frequent complicity in criminal networks, poor training and low pay, and the routine use of excessive force without due sanction. Why, then, have governments been slow to prioritize police reform and why have reform efforts borne largely “limited or nonexistent” long-term results? This chapter highlights a number of lessons suggested by various efforts to reform the police in Latin America over the period 1995-2010 . It focuses on two clusters of countries in Latin America. One is Brazil and the Southern Cone countries (Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay), which made the transition to democracy from prolonged military authoritarian rule in the mid- to late 1980s. The other is Central America and the Andean region (principally El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and Colombia), which emerged/have been emerging from armed conflict since the mid- 1990s. The chapter examines first the long history of international involvement in police and security sector reform in order to identify long-run tropes and path dependencies. It then focuses on a number of recurring themes: cycles of de- and re-militarization of the policing function; the “security gap” and “democratization dilemmas” involved in structural reforms; the opportunities offered by decentralization for more community-oriented police; and police capacity to resist reform and undermine accountability mechanisms.