Yesterday, I linked to a story on Twitter about how four
policemen were arrested shortly after they had kidnapped a businessman in Honduras. The police belonged to the Military Police, a unit created when Juan Orlando Hernandez was a member of Congress in 2013. The police were seeking $6,000 for their victim. I commented that some things never change. With all the recent reforms and specially vetted units, police are frequently still the perpetrators of violence in Central America.
However, I was thinking more historically than today. In The
Protection Racket State that I blogged about a few weeks ago, there are several stories about El Salvador's security forces kidnapping wealthy businessmen during the 1970s and 1980s and then demanding ransom. Many security officials got rich at the same time that the guerrilla cells that would eventually form the FMLN were kidnapping the same group of people to build their war chest. While kidnappings and killings of wealthy businessmen in the 1970s and 1980s were committed by the FMLN, so too were many committed by the military and police which often made it difficult to actually determine who had been responsible for what.
The protection racket comes in to play because the military then played up on citizens' fears of kidnapping and violence to justify their continued rule. Things were so bad that they tried to convince Salvadorans (and the US) that they needed them. They would not only demand political support from the elites that they were kidnapping and protecting, but financial support as well. We'll try our best to prevent your kidnapping if you pay extra - just a little extortion, a protection racket.
The military/police have been kidnapping elites and businessmen for at least 40 years. When, in the case of El Salvador, we talk about an elite-military alliance that controlled the country from 1932 on, we are largely correct. However, it was not absolute. Each had its own preferences that caused them to work against the interests of the other. ARENA was formed because they could no longer rely upon the military to protect elite interests and because of the soft reforms that the US was pushing to transform the country in order to prevent and win the war. Part of the divide between some elites and military in the late 1980s was due to the fact that military/police kidnappings of civilian elites had increased.
I imagine that some of the police and security firms are making out pretty nicely from the insecurity in the region, and many are even contributing to it.
