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| Segundo despliegue territorial de la PNC. Septiembre 1993. Foto cortesía de La Prensa Gráfica. |
Fue un honor. Ahí estaban Álvaro de Soto, el asesor personal del ex Secretario General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. Álvaro tuvo la gentileza de comentar Infiltrados, el libro sobre la corrupción en la Policía Nacional Civil de El Salvador que recién finalice y que se encuentra en las últimas etapas de corrección en UCA Editores. Es un libro "escalofriante", dijo Álvaro. La reunión, organizada por el Centro de Investigaciones de Estudios Sociales de Nueva York a petición del Centro de Estudios Latino Americanos de American University, fue una charla off the record en la que Álvaro De Soto y otros protagonistas del proceso de supervisión internacional del proceso de pacificación salvadoreño reflexionaron sobre aquellos días, sobre la esperanza y las deudas. Ahí estuvieron también Martha Doggett, autora de "Crónica de una muerte anunciada", y Teresa Whitfield, autora de "Pagando el precio"; ambos libros hablan sobre la masacre de la UCA, la trama de encubrimiento oficial alrededor de aquellos asesinatos y de cómo esa trama cimentó la cultura de impunidad que tanto ha crecido en estas dos décadas de posguerra. A ellos y a los organizadores agradezco por pemitirme hablar de Infiltrados. Dejo aquí el discurso que pronuncié en la reunión de Nueva York (en inglés).
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| Copia del cable en que la Embajada de EUA en El Salvador informa a Washington sobre negociaciones entre FMLN y el Gobierno, en el marco de las pláticas de paz, para crear una policía civil. Archivo Nacional, College Park, MD. |
Thank
you for coming here today.
Thank
you to Mr. DeSoto. Ambassadors.
Thank
you Renata and Sabrina.
Thank
you Teresa and Marta for being here.
Last
year I wrote a book about the National Civilian Police of El
Salvador, la Policía
Nacional Civil, the
PNC ,the police body
created by the Peace Accord that ended our civil war in El Salvador
in 1992. I have known about the PNC both as a reporter and as
diplomat.
Let
me first tell you a little bit about myself. I am a journalist by
training. I studied at the Central American University, la
UCA, where I
registered in 1991, a year and a half after six Jesuit priests and
two of their aids were killed on campus by a US elite trained
battalion of the Salvadoran Armed Forces, and a year before peace
accords were signed in Chapultepec, México. In 1994 I started
working as a staff reporter at La Prensa Gráfica, a major Salvadoran
newspaper. Almost from the start, I wrote about the PNC: its dealings
with the rise of kidnappings of rich people, or with sea pirates that
seized shrimp-cargo from mid-sized vessels near the Pacific
shore-line, and its relations with small to mid-sized bands of
smugglers mainly in Eastern El Salvador in the mid 90s. I also
witnessed the deployment of the PNC’s special units as the Counter
narcotics Division and the Finance Division in the ill-guarded border
posts; and the PNC’s struggles to overcome the sins of the past
associated with the old police corps, such as political repression,
torture, disappearances and corruption.
As
a reporter, and years later as an editor of investigative units, I
witnessed the ways of the PNC, of its officials and how post-war
politics shaped the institution.
In
2009, I left journalism for a little while and came to Washington to
work as the Deputy Chief of Mission at the Salvadoran Embassy for the
Funes administration. While in post I was mainly in charge of the
security portfolio in the bilateral relation; security was, in fact,
the main item in the conversation between the Obama administration
and San Salvador. Then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, when
talking about Central America, said security, violence and organized
crime -all issues close to the PNC- were to be at the center of the
regional dialogue. And they have been. From within, I came to
understand better how the mechanics of power were related to the
Police, how politicians have neglected its improvement by letting
particular interests -their own or those of their allies and clients-
interfere even with the idea of a clean, strong, independent Police.
As Juan Faroppa, a UN official some of you know that worked closely
with the PNC in its early years, stated when I interviewed him for my
book: “The elites in El Salvador wanted to make sure to control the
newly created law enforcement unique body. In order to seize control,
those elites did whatever was necessary with the PNC, even if it
meant compromising its independency and its capacity to enforce.”
In
2012, I left the Embassy and the Government of El Salvador due to a
personal disagreement with the Presidential House in how the
administration was dealing with the Police and with the security
issue. I could not represent a Government that had decided to bring
back the military to the security cabinet and had backed away on its
initial and promising intention of cleaning the Police of an elite
that had used its connections with dirty politicians and with
organized crime to ensure its own power.
So,
I left and decided to write a book about the PNC.
Let
me use two stories to talk about what Infiltrados
is about and how it relates to the process, the unique and hopeful
Salvadoran process, that the United Nations helped achieve and
supervise back in the 90s. A process several of you know well because
you were at the very core of it.
By
telling you these stories I intend also to turn the page to the next
chapter, to talk about what are the challenges ahead.
As
I said, this story begins in 1992, when the National Civilian Police,
one of the institutions that came to exist as part of the Peace
Accord. The accord was a groundbreaking milestone for our political
history that the FMLN commanders, La
Comandancia, signed
with the Government presided by Alfredo Cristiani, the moderate
right-winger that fought his way to overcome the dark forces aligned
at the extreme military and paramilitary wing of his party. Those
were times of hope, of uncertainty, yes, but also of hope. We all
witnessed the struggle of a lot of agents, officials and a few
honest, committed politicians to create, as Peruvian former UN
adviser Gino Costa wrote, “something new from the ruins of the
old.” Did we as Salvadorans succeed in that task? Because let´s
make no mistake here: whatever happened after the UN left the ground
of the tiny embattled Central American country where I was born is
our responsibility; it is for us, Salvadorans, to take the credit and
the blame of what we did good and bad. When history´s accountability
is demanded, it is us who must respond.
Let
me tell you the first story, the story of a massacre.
The
lieutenant stood by the door, his face covered by stripes of black
camouflage. It was time. He called one of the men standing in a
garden some 25 mts ahead guarding the four suspects lying in the
ground. “When are you going to proceed?”, asked the lieutenant
when the man arrived at the door.
The soldier understood he had been
given an order. He went back to the garden and whispered to one of
his fellow soldiers: “Let´s proceed”.
Within
seconds, the soldiers emptied their machine guns into the bodies of
the men lying in the garden: four Jesuits priests. Their names:
Ignacio Ellacuría Beascoechea, Segundo Montes Mozo, Ignacio
Martín-Baró and Amando López Quintana. Four others were to be
killed that night: Joaquín López and Juan Ramón Moreno, also
priests, and their cook, Elba Ramos, and her daughter, Celina
Marissette, age 16, who was soon to be married.
All
of you know about these events. Martha and Teresa wrote thorough and
brave descriptions of those killings. Teresa gave us a complete
profile of Ellacuría and an intense recount of how the traditional
powers in El Salvador –the economic and military elites– made
those who opposed them pay with their lives. Martha told us how the
last massacre of the war was planned and executed by the military and
how the first big act of impunity of the post-war was performed
through a massive cover-up operation by all levels of those
traditional powers, all the way up to the Commander in Chief. One of
the main instruments of those operations was Cnl. Manuel Rivas Mejía,
a young official trained and nurtured from 1984 on by the US military
as part of a strategy to modernize the ESAF, respond to worries in
Washington about human right violations by the army and guarantee
full support for the Salvadoran ally in its “fight against
communism”. Rivas Mejía became head of, the Special Investigative
Unit of the National Police, the SIU, and in 1989, Rivas Mejia became
the leading investigative officer in the Jesuit massacre. His main
role, as the Truth Commission later established, was to cover-up the
massacre. Despite that, the Salvadoran Government, backed by the US,
positioned him as head of the new PNC, but after his involvement in
the Jesuit case came to light, he was not offered the position.
Nonetheless, his students, detectives that had learned in the worst
years of the war how to fabricate, obstruct or kill the means for
justice, did make it to the new PNC. And with them, the culture of
impunity infiltrated our new Police from its foundation. Here is
where my book begins.
The
good news is, I think, that El Salvador is better off now than it was
20 years ago, when a lieutenant could whisper the order to kill that
a Clnl had given him –order that now a Spanish judge claims was
given to that Clnl by the high command of the ESAF– and get away
with it. It is fair to say that a crime committed by the State, such
as one of such magnitude, is now highly unlikely. The bad news is
violence is an ongoing epidemic in El Salvador and impunity is an
unanswered challenge, one that political power is yet to address.
This
translates to the PNC. The good news is that after 20 plus years we
don´t have an institution whose main role is to eliminate the
adversary, although it was even when the old PN was fully dismantled
What
we don´t have, though, is an institution committed to justice for
all. That being, as former CICIG commissioner, Francisco
D´Allanesse, describes, officers committed to answering to no one
but the law, not to a politician or a drug dealer. That we don´t
have. Back in 1999, Salvadoran scholar José Miguel Cruz -himself an
UCA graduate and a Jesuits pupil- wrote that the new Police, when
formed and deployed, had a double task: besides the inherent one of
enforcing the law and keeping peace, it was to be the face of the new
process, democracy and the new country. The New Police, wrote Cruz,
had to secure the country while convincing Salvadorans that the rule
of law, not political repression or corruption, was its unique
standard. Well, if we are optimistic, it is fair to say that the PNC
had a good start in the first of its tasks as it was able to overcome
the firsts blitz of violence in the post war period, but if we are to
be realistic, it has to be said that the PNC failed in its second
task, that of becoming an agent of change. By neglecting its own
internal cleansing and empowering without accountability, the rise of
an elite of officers that were educated in the ways of the past, the
PNC failed.
Let
me tell you the second story:
The
old man arrived to the detective section of the PNC in the morning as
he had done almost daily since three hit-men killed his son, a young
engineer
At
the crime scene, in front of the house of a relative whom his son was
visiting, the old man had help put the bleeding body of his son into
a pick-up truck that took him to the hospital. Before the old man got
into his own car to follow the pick-up truck, a construction worker
approached him: “Mr. I saw everything. They came in a dark car; two
of them stepped out and opened fire, the third one stayed in the car.
That guy, the one that stayed, had just two fingers in one of his
hands”, the worker said. The young engineer died five hours later at the hospital. The day after, the old man started a quest
for justice that was going to uncover how contaminated the new Police
was only two years after it took control of all law enforcement power
in El Salvador.
The
old man arrived at the precinct that morning, as he had done daily,
but the officer that usually talked to him about his son´s case was
not there. Another detective came. As both were chatting, and the old
man became anguished, the new detective posed his arm around the old
man´s shoulder. The victim´s father noticed at one: the policeman
lacked three fingers in one of his hands.
The
name of that detective was Carlos Romero Alfaro, aka Zaldaña, a
former PN hit man and Clnl. Rivas subordinate. The young engineer’s
name was Ramón Mauricio García Prieto.
A
former assistant to the AG office in El Salvador told me that Romero
Alfaro leaded an assassin´s squad in the PNC DIC or División
de Investigación Criminal,
heir unit to the SIU. The hit squad was called Assassins Inc. Before
being involved in the García Prieto murder, Romero Alfaro had killed
FMLN fmr. Commander Francisco Velis, a murder that in 94 was
characterized by a UN SG as the worst violation to the peace process.
Romero Alfaro was convicted for the Velis case, but barely: two
lawyers that back then were advisors to the DIC helped him escape.
One of the lawyers hid an arrest warrant and the other misled the
investigation and tampered with witnesses. One of the lawyers became
Inspector General in the 2000s; the other became Attorney General of
El Salvador.
With
the arrival of the new century, the old vices were there still in the
Salvadoran Police and now validated by the new acronym: La
PNC, one of the proud
children of the Peace Accord. Again, in all fairness it is imperative
to say that the PNC is a different institution but El Salvador is, as
a whole, a different country thanks to what happened in 1992 and the
process we then started. If we were to say, here and now, that our
institutions are the same as they were 30 years ago we would probably
still be killing each other. What the PNC is not is a suitable
institution to face the ever growing challenges to our fragile
democracy, which in the case of Public Security have to do with the
action of sophisticated organized crime that find in those old rings
of corruption and impunity a great place to grow.
The
second half of Infiltrados
is about how old criminal bands, that began their criminal careers in
the 80s as weapon or drug smugglers, used their new found connections
with the PNC to develop into sophisticated drug trafficking
organizations (DTOs). These new DTOs are now capable of money
laundering, have secured pacts with major criminal players in the
region –such as Mexican and Colombian cartels- and learned how to
use the formal economy and financial system. Nowadays, this
“entrepreneurs” of crime, long-time tolerated and nurtured by law
enforcement an politicians in El Salvador, are regional players
themselves.
U.S.
Professor Bruce Bagley, from the University of Miami, when
addressing organized crime in the Americas, refers to the cockroach
effect which is when crime goes to the filthiest and darkest places.
Regrettably, El Salvador´s PNC is, in so many areas, a very dark and
filthy place. What happened? I proposed here two of the four pillars
of the infiltration of crime in the PNC which I talk about in the
book and that I think might be interesting to folks that oversee
pacification and institutional reform processes around the world.
- The power of the past. Supranational powers will always have a limit when dealing with the status quo. The case of El Salvador was extraordinary: both parts agreed to end the war and also agreed on the basic reform necessary to engage in the construction of a new society. The best results of that are for all to see: alternation in power, freedom of speech, freedom of association and in terms of violence, the evolution of the State from an entity engaged in the act of producing it to an entity merely incapable of containing it. But the worst and unfinished rooms of that house are still plenty and important: even in those early days, the parts –las partes– understood that whatever power they were able to retain while the referee was present would allow them to set the rules for the times to come. In the case of the PNC, the deal was clear: the traditional economic and military elites managed to set the rules and establish their command after what was known as Plan 600, a pact that allowed the military to transfer their own –the Rivas, DIC type– to the PNC’s highest level in the chain of command and to the FMLN to cut a better deal in Plan 600 of its mid-level war commanders. As Gino Costa wrote: on the road, they settled for the future, the forces of the past made sure to maintain a safety net. And, in the case of the PNC, that was very harmful: it compromised its capacity to enforce the law, to investigate and track down crime within those powers. As US researchers David Holiday and William Stanley wrote: UN capacity as referee was to go as far as those powers agreed on in all fairness. In the case of the PNC, las partes decided to overstep the referee in essential parts of the deal. Pressure coming from well recognized and influential external powers, nonetheless, have proven effective to start changes: the CICIG model in Guatemala and recent pushes coming from the US Senate for El Salvador to address pending issues in security are examples of that. Maintaining accountability over those changes is another story, though. That, I am afraid, can only be asked to do by an internal player: civil society. In El Salvador five post-war administrations have failed the PNC´s debt with transparency; it is time for civil society -non-committed with the old political schemes of the war, as the two major parties are- to step in.
- The unfulfilled changes. The politics of change are, as you know, very complex. But in these scenarios international pressure and dialogue should be focused always on institutions, and mainly on the legal and formal framework. An example: One guarantee for impunity in the PNC has been the lack of an effective Internal Affair unit. They do not exist. Inspector Generals, besides two very outstanding exceptions –two women–, have been mere puppets in the hands of PNC ruling elite (the current one just told a journalist that he doesn’t have any notice about the involvement of police officers with organized crime; this when UNODC and US DOS have said otherwise unequivocally and, most importantly, when all serious academia and journalism in the country have proven otherwise). Even when the empowerment of an IG is a matter of political will, it could also start as a formal issue: in the case of El Salvador, the IG is named by the Director General; a legal reform to create an autonomous unit that could bring more independence has been proposed several times but has always been overlooked or blocked. PDDH, another child of the Peace Accord, is a good example of how autonomy can guarantee transparency: despite marginalization by the political formal power and its own flaws, the Ombudsman office has been one of the most effective watchdogs in El Salvador. The problem is that PDDH does not have prosecutorial capacities. The IG does.
I
will finish with the three ideas that I consider key to addressing
the PNC´s challenges in the future. The challenges of the Police
have to do with those threats that have put at risk the hope with
which we faced peace back in 1992. I have said that we are better
now. I truly believe that. But I also believe that if unanswered, the
same realities that have overwhelmed the PNC, such as corruption,
obscurity, penetration of crime and lack of accountability will
destroy the foundations of the idea we envisioned after Chapultepec.
Formal
accountability, empowerment of the new power, a civil society
uncompromised with the ways of the past and willing to move forward
beyond the boundaries of the war that are still alive. Information;
the right to know what has happened and who has done it -- the only
reason Clnl Rivas Mejía didn’t become the first head of the PNC is
that his name was mentioned by the Truth Commission. So, naming the
names is essential. That is why I wrote Infiltrados.
New
York, November 25th
2013.
