Criminality, Public Security, and the Challenge to Democracy in Latin America

Chapter Four: La Mano Dura: Current Dilemmas in Latin American Police Reform

c hapt e r four La Mano Dura Current Dilemmas in Latin American Police Reform mark ungar Amid mounting crime in Latin America over the past ten years— including a 41 percent rise in homicides that has made it the world’s most crime-ridden region1 —governments throughout the region have enacted a wide range of reforms to make the police more effective and accountable. While such changes extend over a broad range of proposals, most fall into three general areas. First is structural reorganization of police agencies through regional decentralization, simplified hierarchies, more professionalized security, oversight and disciplinary bodies, and other measures to improve efficiency, professionalism, and accountability . Second, since the early 1990s, fourteen countries have addressed their notoriously slow and biased criminal justice systems—most of which resolve fewer than 2 percent of homicides—with new penal process codes to strengthen defendant and due process rights, replace slow 93 94 Mark Ungar and biased written procedures with oral trials, transfer investigative authorities from the police to prosecutors (fiscales) in the Attorney General ’s Office (Ministerio Público, MP), create investigative and sentencing courts, and improve institutional cooperation. The third change is the introduction of community policing, which aims to empower citizens to respond directly to crime through neighborhood patrols, education programs, social services, and councils comprised of citizens, politicians, and police officials. Often, police restructuring measures to increase policy-citizen interaction, such as giving more autonomy to neighborhood police commissioners (comisarios), supplement community policing . In addition to reducing violence, community policing is also one of the most popular bases of police reform around the world because it bypasses dysfunctional criminal justice systems. While many of these reforms are new and so have yet to show results, most of them have already been weakened and undermined—even those that have been carefully formulated and gained broad support. The range and complexity of obstacles to reform is as wide as the reforms themselves , of course, but this chapter identifies three interrelated levels of obstruction that begin to demonstrate the challenges facing attempts to reform Latin America’s police. I describe these obstacles and show how they reinforce each other in four countries in each of the main subregions of Latin America with highly different political and socioeconomic conditions: Honduras, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Argentina. I explain how the interaction of political, legal, and functional obstacles in each case undermines promising police reforms and lead instead to a mano dura (iron fist) approach. In doing so, I also explain how community policing is helping overcome those obstacles. In fact, as is stressed in this volume, specifying impediments to change is one of the best ways to understand what kinds of reforms may be actually realistic and feasible. OBSTACLES TO REFORM The first type of obstacle to reform is political. On one level, changes to established practices usually clash with the interests of police forces and state officials—that is, with those responsible for implementing any police reform. Most alterations of police functioning are seen as meddling La Mano Dura 95 or as punitive means to reduce police power, so obstruction by police and criminal justice agencies is common. Even reform packages that balance such changes with rewards such as higher pay and better technology may still fall prey to such resistance. On a broader level, political pressures to crack down on crime—the first or second concern in national polls throughout Latin America since the mid-1990s—undermine police reforms.2 Most governments have been unable to develop effective longterm policy responses due to financial limitations, sharpening political divisions, and the state’s institutional incapacities. Far easier and more popular is a mano dura approach by presidents and governors, who, usually limited to one term, want immediate results. Mano dura is a toughened version of “zero tolerance,” a policy based on the “broken windows” theory,3 which argues that petty crimes, intimidation, and physical deterioration are the real causes of crime because they scare off law-abiding citizens and allow delinquency to take root in an area. Detentions for misdemeanors and antisocial behavior would therefore prevent the conditions in which crime grows, taking criminals off the street and catching those with illegal arms or wanted for outstanding crimes. This policy is said to have brought about the record-breaking drop in homicides of 71 percent in New York City between 1990 and 1998.4 In Latin America, of course, zero...