En el pasado las declaraciones de guerra, las treguas y los armisticios se practicaban entre los Estados. Hoy, no es raro que se lo haga con organizaciones no estatales, tales como: grupos rebeldes, fracciones separatistas y hasta mega criminales. Tal como acaba de ocurrir en El Salvador donde el Estado acaba de acordar una tregua con las temibles maras, logrando una drástica reducción de delitos.
El Salvador Gang Truce Raises Troubling Questions for Region
By Rachel Schwartz | 11 May 2012
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| Integrantes de una mara salvadoreña. |
El Salvador, only recently home to the world’s second-highest homicide rate, has watched murders plummet by 60 percent since early March. The unprecedented decline, however, is not the result of conventional policies aimed at eliminating criminal activity, but rather a very different development: a negotiated truce between the country’s two leading gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18. On March 9, some 30 gang leaders were moved to lower security prisons to engage in discussions led by the Catholic Church and a former congressman. El Salvador’s online investigative journal El Faro broke the story on March 14, and the gangs issued a joint statement confirming the pact a week later. President Mauricio Funes and the Salvadoran government have repeatedly denied any role in the negotiations, despite abetting them by authorizing the prison transfers.
The early results of the agreement have been promising. On April 15, El Salvador witnessed its first homicide-free day in nearly three years. Just last week, the gangs vowed to end the practice of forcible recruitment and expanded the cease-fire to schools, declaring them “zones of peace.”
But the gang truce has left lawmakers and security experts in El Salvador and across the region grappling with a slew of unsettling questions. The plunge in homicides has no doubt been a welcome development in a country boasting a murder rate of 66 per 100,000 inhabitants, more than three times that of Mexico and 13 times that of the United States. But there is widespread skepticism on how long it will last. Beyond the prison transfers to facilitate the agreements and communicate the truce to rank-and-file members, it is unclear what, if any, further concessions have been made to incentivize long-term peace. If the current breakdown of Belize’s 2011 gang truce is any indication, such pacts are bound to unravel without the guarantee of protection for demobilized gang members and resources for their reintegration into society.
Moreover, gang leadership in El Salvador appears not at all inclined to curb other criminal activities beyond murders. In a recent communiqué, MS-13 and Barrio 18 negotiators stated that extortions would continue until the government provided members alternate income-generating opportunities. Thus, despite initial positive results, the negotiated pause in killings remains a partial and fragile solution.
But perhaps the most worrisome consequence of the truce is its implications for the rule of law in Central America more broadly. The truce’s immediate benefits are arguably outweighed by the disconcerting message sent to criminal groups and the rest of society that governments are willing to address violence through compromise with perpetrators, rather than by seeking justice. According to security analyst Douglas Farah, “The pact reflects that [the gangs] are clearly trying to view themselves as political actors and to understand what that means." The current truce could serve to rally gangs in other countries to seek legitimacy through a broader political project, Farah argued. There is also the danger that Central America’s 70,000 gang members are watching the developments in El Salvador to gauge how far they might push governments in eventual negotiations. Any ground ceded by El Salvador today could encourage criminal bands elsewhere to escalate their demands in the future.
For this reason, Central American governments have mostly steered clear of bargaining with the gangs, despite the failure of current law-and-order approaches. Successive administrations throughout the isthmus, regardless of ideological leanings, have stuck to iron-fisted policies of criminalizing gang membership and incarcerating suspected delinquents en masse. Versions of these “anti-terrorism” laws, as they have been called, were implemented in El Salvador in 2003 and 2007 and Honduras in 2003 and 2011. Occasional roundups of alleged gang affiliates in Guatemala have had similar objectives, and anti-gang legislation proposed by newly elected President Otto Pérez Molina would allow children as young as 12 to be tried as adults.
This tough-on-crime stance has only served to exacerbate gang warfare, according to most observers. As Central America expert José Miguel Cruz writes, “The states’ repressive policies, designed to crack down on gangs, contributed to their further expansion across the region” and provoked “an all-out war with the governments.” But any state strategy short of a full-fledged assault on the gangs sends a message to criminals and citizens that governments are caving. For Central America’s political leaders, the perceived consequences of sacrificing the rule of law have so far trumped the political dividends of overseeing a historic drop in violence.
Still, it is difficult to imagine how Central American governments might strengthen the rule of law without a halt in the killings, like the one seen in El Salvador. Over the past several decades, Central America -- in particular the three “northern triangle” countries of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras -- has been a case study in the self-perpetuating cycles of violence and impunity. In the absence of capable and credible law enforcement and judicial institutions, criminals across the region enjoy a 90 percent rate of impunity -- rarely facing trial, much less investigation, for illegal activities. Allowing violent crimes to go unpunished tacitly encourages them, further hindering the ability of already overburdened institutions to respond. Simply put, violence and impunity beget more violence and impunity. Without a dramatic break in this cycle, Central America’s institutions will continue their uphill battle of struggling to strengthen capacities amid sustained violence and a daunting backlog of cases.
Though it is still too early to draw conclusions from El Salvador’s gang truce, the pact has already provoked dilemmas for policymakers and citizens across Central America. Should the homicide rate in El Salvador continue to plunge, negotiating with dangerous criminal actors will become a more enticing policy option for the region’s governments. But even in seeking immediate relief from the bloodshed, leaders must painstakingly weigh the means through which it can be achieved. As the adverse effects of heavy-handed policies have shown, it is often the law of unintended consequences that governs Central America.
Rachel Schwartz is a program assistant at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, D.C. She works on the Congressional Program and the Initiative on Security and Migration in Central America and Mexico. She can be reached at rschwartz@thedialogue.org or followed on Twitter at @rachel_schwartz.
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