Soldiers stand guard in their military vehicle outside a clandestine drug processing laboratory discovered in Zapotlanejo (Courtesy Reuters).

There are many theories out  there about why we have seen a huge uptick in violence in Mexico – now running close to 25,000 homicides a year. An interesting academic paper by Melissa Dell, PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),  tests one particular theory – elaborated by Eduardo Guerrero among others — that the policies spearheaded by Calderón and the PAN more generally have actually caused the increase in violence.  To do so she uses statistical models to examine how PAN victories in close mayoral elections affect violence locally, and whether they have “spillover effects”, causing traffickers to divert their routes to neighboring municipalities.

She finds that when a new PAN mayor comes in after a close election, homicides become 9 percent more likely, and drug traffickers are much more prone to have confrontations with the police. The movement of drugs also shifts to nearby towns  — causing an increase in violence there — confirming the so-called cucaracha, or cockroach, effect.  Dell argues that government’s policy is behind these statistically significant differences, and specifically that  the PAN’s decisions — from top to bottom — to take on drug traffickers more aggressively than other parties is behind the surge.

This rigorous analysis is extremely helpful, and is the type of work that academics should be sharing with policymakers on both sides of the border. Yet we should also be mindful of the limitations.  For one, Dell only considers locally produced drugs – marijuana, heroin, meth – leaving out the biggest cash cow, cocaine. Her analysis also exclusively focuses on drugs and not organized criminal groups’ other businesses such as extortion, kidnapping and human trafficking (she does nod to these, but finds no adequate dataset to use). As the business model has changed, so too have the targets, bringing these criminal groups much closer to the general population –as customers and as prey.

This leads to the third limitation – the assumption that “more than 85 percent of the [drug] violence consists of people involved in the drug trade killing each other,” a figure repeated a number of times without any footnotes. Though this has also been the mantra of the federal government over the last five years, so far neither the Mexican government nor outside sources have provided any proof that this is true. Of the nearly 50,000 drug trade-related deaths since 2006, the Attorney General’s office has investigated less than 1,000 (and solved less than 350). Given the shifting commercial interests of the criminals (bringing them closer to innocent civilians), it seems doubtful that the deaths are  still almost all between the gangsters themselves, or that the percentage of bad guys killing bad guys hasn’t changed.  Indeed, as a recent Human Rights Watch report points out, there are many cases of misclassification, where the authorities presume that murder victims are linked to drug traffickers until proven otherwise (which they rarely are, since the Attorney General’s office investigates less than 2 percent of the killings). The rise in extrajudicial killings by the military, also laid out in detail by Human Rights Watch, further questions these claims.

Finally Dell makes the assumption –  repeated in the press and elsewhere – that drug-related violence picked up with Calderón and his “war against narcotraffickers.” But the data show that the uptick started earlier, under president Fox, increasing some 40 percent from 2004 to 2005, and another 25 percent from 2005-2006. This doesn’t necessarily disqualify a PAN-ista effect (given both Fox and Calderón hail from the same party), but it needs to be explored more, as the security policies of the two differed in some respects.

The paper provides some policy suggestions, particularly regarding how to best use scarce law enforcement resources (for starters, don’t set up roadblocks). But the other more ominous implication is that if drug traffickers are rational economic actors, and PAN victories are so costly for them (in terms of relocating their routes or bringing in competitors), it makes sense for them to invest up front – and buy more local elections. As we head into 2012, all should be worried about this conclusion.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Photographs of missing people are on display at a square in Queretaro (Courtesy Reuters).

Last Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its report “Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture and Disappearances in Mexico’s ‘War on Drugs’.” The report is incredibly thorough – based on two years of research in the states of Baja California, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Nuevo León and Tabasco, and incorporating information from over 200 interviews. It charges Mexican security forces with routinely violating citizens’ most basic rights during President Felipe Calderón’s six years in office, and further argues that these horrific tactics are not incidental, but endemic to the government’s drug war strategy.

Some of the most worrisome statistics and findings include:

·       Formal human rights abuse complaints increased seven-fold, from 691 during the 2003-2006 period, to 4,803 from 2007-2010

·       Of some 3,700 military investigations into human rights abuses in the past four years, just 15 – less than one half of one percent — resulted in convictions

·      Formal complaints of “degrading treatment” – read torture — at the hands of security forces more than tripled since 2006

Based on witness testimonies and material evidence in specific cases HRW investigated they find:

·       Law enforcement – including the Army, Navy, Federal Police as well as local and federal judicial investigative police — participated in over 170 specific cases of torture – including beating,    asphyxiating, water boarding, electrically shocking and sexually torturing detainees

·       Others facilitate this torture –  medical examiners fail to document signs of physical abuse on detainees, and judges admit confessions and other evidence acquired through torture, even when the victim protests

·       Law enforcement played a part in 39 “forced disappearances” and 24 extrajudicial killings of civilians

After a meeting with HRW representatives Calderón agreed to investigate the findings, though he did say that the “main threat to the human rights of Mexicans is from criminals”.

Why have human rights violations expanded so drastically?  One explanation lies in the use of the military.  Armed forces are trained to kill the enemy on the battlefield, not police neighborhoods to ensure basic public safety. With some 50,000 soldiers now on the front-lines of the drug war, this disconnect can lead to abuses of the rule of law.

Another reason is the profound weakness of Mexico’s judicial system.  Most crimes – likely 80 plus percent — are never even reported. Of the few complaints filed, the Attorney General’s Office (PGR) investigates only one in every five; even fewer go to trial. In the end, only one to two of every hundred crimes end in a conviction. Once prosecutors do move forward with a case however, the chances of acquittal are slim, as roughly 9 in 10 of all suspects brought to court end up in jail. This has less to do with the stellar cases built around airtight evidence, and more to do with the underlying system, which is stacked against defendants – resulting in few safeguards and a de facto presumption of guilt.

Finally, Mexico doesn’t even have the laws needed in some cases to prosecute bad behavior. For instance, only eight of Mexico’s thirty-two states have laws against forced disappearances and only sixteen have formally criminalized torture. What it does have is opportunities to limit citizen rights – such as the arraigo procedure, which lets prosecutors lock up individuals for up to 80 days if they’re allegedly involved in organized crime, and vaguely defined “flagrancia” rules that dictate when police officers can make arrests without a warrant.

The spike in human rights complaints is worrisome on many levels. First and foremost, it reflects the government’s utter failure to protect thousands of citizens from itself. But more strategically, the abuses described in the report run counter to the state’s long-term aims.  In order to “win” the war on organized crime, Mexico’s government must have society’s support. Egregious human rights violations will just push away the one force the narcos can’t match. To end drug related violence, Mexico must construct a truly democratic rule of law, in which the means to and the ends are one and the same. To do so, the government must track and punish human rights abuses and abusers as fervently as it does those on its Most Wanted lists.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Governors (L-R) Jose Guadalupe Osuna Millan of Baja, Humberto Moreira Valdes of Coahuila, Texas Governor Rick Perry, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jose Natividad Gonzalez Paras of Nuevo Leon, Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano and Eduardo Bours Castelo of Sonora pose as characters from the movie "Terminator" at the 26th Border Governors Conference (Courtesy Reuters).

This week the Mexican state of Baja California will host the two-day Border Governor’s Conference. Started nearly two decades ago, the annual meeting brings together governors from all four U.S. and six Mexican border states to discuss the issues directly affecting their states and citizens. At its height in the early 2000s, the governors and their ministers met not just with each other but also with representatives from Commerce, Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and other departments and agencies to influence border-centered debates in both Washington, DC and Mexico City.

But in recent years the conference has fallen on hard times, a victim of polarizing politics. The 2009 session hinted at the divides, as the governors of Arizona, California and Texas failed to make it to Monterrey due to “scheduling conflicts.” It hit its nadir in 2010 in the wake of Arizona SB 1070. The Mexican governors wrote a letter calling the law “discriminatory [and] racist” and announced their plan to boycott the meeting if hosted, as planned, by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer in Phoenix. Brewer cancelled the conference in retaliation. In the end, Governor Richardson of New Mexico held the meeting, but no other U.S. governors attended, leaving the future of this consultative mechanism in limbo.

The conference also has suffered from a sprawling agenda and size. With its initial successes the agenda items grew, as did the number of participants. In recent years there have been some 25 working groups on topics ranging from wildlife to science and technology. The influx of hundreds of staffers and activists has made the process much more cumbersome, and reduced the intimacy and spirit of cooperation that guided the conference in the past. Reduced in large part to the signing of agreements and photo opportunities, many governors (particularly from the United States), began skipping the event.

As the United States and Mexico search for common ground and mutual solutions to pressing problems, it is time to revitalize this mechanism. It should refocus on practical problems facing the border states and their residents. Rather than covering the gamut, the agenda should be streamlined to emphasize a few vital issues. It must enable leaders to actually meet and discuss the serious challenges facing their states and constituencies, re-energizing the consultative element of the event. Most pressing today is security, where policy so far has been guided from the center, even though the effects are concentrated on the border.

Once refocused, the border governors need to organize better to influence their respective governments, shaping policies that in turn shape the border. One potential model is the Pacific Northwest Economic Region (PNWER), which brings together state legislators, governors, civil society and businesses to lobby the federal government and strengthen U.S.-Canada border security and the region’s economic competitiveness. Another is scaling up the San Diego Association of Governments’s (SANDAG) annual binational conference, which brings together local leaders in California and Baja California to address just one broad agenda item at each meeting – such as the economic impact of wait times at shared border crossings.

As Arizona Governor, Janet Napolitano repeatedly said that one of her closest day-to-day working relationships was with Sonora Governor Eduardo Bours. This reality – that cross-border issues and events strongly affect border state residents’ daily lives — hasn’t changed. Revitalizing the Border Governor’s Conference is one means to address these shared challenges, and reincorporate regional problem-solving strategies into larger U.S.-Mexico debates.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Narco Killings 2011 Map (Courtesy WM Consulting).

There has been much debate in Mexico about the number of drug-related killings since the start of drug war in 2006. The Mexican government provides an official database that puts this figure at some 35,000. Others, such as Reforma, provide an estimate near the official number — but more current — now totalling some 37,000.

As important as the total numbers is their breakdown. Here, the Mexican government provides some estimates, sorting the murders according to whether they were acts of aggression, executions or occurred as a result of a confrontation. Walter McKay at WM Consulting has built a useful tool by scouring local newspapers in many (but not yet all) Mexican states. This map depicts the murders according to whether the victim was a civilian, politician (or other high profile individual), or law enforcement official, and also shows the sites of car bombs and mass graves. McKay puts the number of deaths as a result of the drug war at some 47,000, significantly higher than the government estimate. As the policy debates continue, these various sources of information will be vital to informing steps forward.

This week the Woodrow Wilson Center released its report, “Organized Crime in Central America: The Northern Triangle”, which has many well researched and written chapters on the accelerated rise of criminal structures over the past three decades in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. To bolster weak rule of law institutions vulnerable to the influence of organized crime in the region, it argues, the U.S. will need to contribute more funds to the region’s security initiatives – even as individual  countries play a greater part by collecting more taxes. Though overall the picture is disheartening, this useful study lays out the complex factors underlying the violence in Central America today.

It also shows that while all Central American nations struggle with crime and violence, the real security challenges are in the Northern Triangle – where the magnitude and type of organized criminal operations are unparalleled. This finding questions the traditional blanket regional approach taken by the United States (through CARSI), or the way other Latin American or European countries develop multilateral security initiatives within Central America.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A man holds a symbol of the Patriot Party during a political rally in Solola (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

Front-runner Otto Pérez Molina won 36% of the vote in first round of Guatemala’s presidential elections on Sunday, and will face off against second place finisher Manuel Baldizón in the second round in November. Though winning the runoff election will not be easy for either candidate (both have to build coalitions to clinch a second-round victory); far trickier will be facing Guatemala’s long list of challenges, topped by insecurity.

Guatemala’s murder rate has more than doubled in the last twenty years, reaching a high in 2009 when nearly 6,500 people were killed – 17 a day — more than in the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. Over the past four years the government of Álvaro Colom has been unable to quell the violence or bring its perpetrators to justice. During the campaign the leading presidential candidates advocated a mano dura, or iron fist security policy, with Pérez Molina as its most forceful proponent (his Patriot Party has a clenched fist as its emblem). He even proposed bringing back the notorious military task forces used against guerrillas in the 1980s and 1990s, this time to take on drug traffickers.

It is unlikely this strategy will work. Guatemala’s military today doesn’t have the capacity to ramp up its public safety functions. As a part of the 1996 peace agreements (ending 36 years of civil war) the military agreed to downsize. The current force stands at 17,000 troops (roughly 60 percent less than 1990 levels).  Earlier this year, when the government called a state of siege in the northern province of Alta Verapaz taken hostage by traffickers, the military could only send 600 soldiers in to patrol the area – less than one tenth the size of the Mexican military force sent to fight the La Familia cartel in Michoacán in 2006. After the operation, President Colom himself admitted that the military could not match the drug traffickers’ vast resources, noting “just the weapons seized in Alta Verapaz are more than those of some army brigades.”

But the issue is not just one of capacity. Even if the government found the resources to beef up the military, it shouldn’t be the force to take over the fight against organized crime. If deploying the armed forces in Mexico’s drug war is considered controversial, in Guatemala it is decidedly more complicated. The Guatemalan army enjoys considerably less citizen trust than their Mexican counterparts due to their long and ignominious involvement in the country’s brutal civil conflict. The U.N. truth commission report (whose findings Pérez Molina questions) deemed the war a genocide, and blamed the army for 93 percent of the massacres of innocent civilians that occurred. Breaking the peace accords’ promise to keep the military out of citizen security would be a step backward to a past many would rather not revisit.

Growing evidence too suggests the military itself may well have ties to organized crime. Reports from the UN peacekeeping mission in Guatemala (MINUGUA), and a number of NGOs show that long standing military ties with the criminal groups that today work with Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers.  The Kaibiles, an elite special operations force, trained some of the Mexican soldiers that would later become the Zetas, and many former Kaibiles now work full time for the cartels.

If the army is not the right choice for improving security, the only alternative is the National Civil Police (PNC). Unfortunately, the PNC faces many of these same challenges: a lack of manpower, resources, and public trust. Furthermore, the U.S. and the Guatemalan government have tried a number of times, and on the whole failed to reinvent the PNC in the past.

Still, trying again is the least bad alternative. And there are a few hopeful signs from the past year. With new wiretapping, plea bargaining and seized assets laws in place (in no small part due to the work of CICIG), the police have arrested some high-ranking drug traffickers and suspects in high-profile murders. With human rights leader Helen Mack at the helm of a new police reform initiative, some observers are more optimistic about the chances of finally building a professionalized Guatemalan police force.

As the U.S. and other countries in the region look to begin working with the new administration, security assistance – including Mérida funds — should focus on strengthening the national police (and court systems). Despite the PNC’s past failures, and Guatemala’s weak institutions in general, the issue of security is simply too important to let fall by the wayside, or worse, into the wrong hands.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Argentine President Fernandez waves to supporters after hearing the first results of the nationwide primary election in Buenos Aires (Enrique Maracarian/Courtesy Reuters).

The Pew Research Center released the results of a wide-ranging public opinion poll based on interviews with some 800 Mexicans (the study is part of their larger Global Attitudes Project). It finds strong continued support for military – 83 percent favor their role in the drug war – and for U.S.-Mexico security cooperation, with nearly 3 in 4 Mexicans supporting U.S. training and weapons for national security forces. Calderón, despite an economic recession and ever more bloody drug war, still enjoys the confidence of a majority of Mexicans, with 57% saying they view his political influence in a positive light. While these numbers look bad vis-à-vis past Mexican presidents entering their last term in office, other Western Hemisphere leaders (Barack Obama and Sebastian Piñera, for example) would be quite pleased with such levels of support.

A recent survey of the Guatemalan judiciary, on the other hand, paints rule of law institutions in a much more more troubling light. The Plaza Pública study shows that overall Guatemalans see judges as corrupt, controlled (by vested economic interests and other political elites), and inefficient.

This Cefeidas Group report provides an update on the Argentine elections, where Cristina Fernández de Kirchner looks even more likely to win a second term in the October 23rd election, due in part to the weakness of the opposition.

On a different note, Rolling Stone has an in-depth and well written article about La Barbie, a native Texan who rose to become the top drug kingpin in Acapulco. The behind the scenes narrative of his rise and fall shows why going after kingpins will not, on its own, make Mexico safer.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A worker at a luxury cowboy boot factory works on pairs of boots in the central city of Leon (Courtesy Reuters).

An IMF report published this week lauds the Mexican economy’s health, and credits robust  fundamentals and good policy choices for its success in weathering the storm of global economic crisis. With even more positive news, a recent study by the Mexican government shows that FDI is still pouring in despite violence, and is actually going to the most dangerous areas. But this doesn’t mean that violence is not having an effect on the economy. In this Americas Quarterly article, Dora Beszterczey and I argue that violence actually has the greatest economic impact on small and medium sized companies, not the multinationals and domestic conglomerates that receive FDI inflows. At this local level there are signs that heightened violence is taking its toll, increasingly forcing entrepreneurs to pack their bags in search of a safer business environment.

There are a number of interesting profiles of Peru’s new drug chief Ricardo Soberón in the news this week. As I talked about in the past, security issues related to drug trafficking and organized crime will be a huge challenge for Humala. While El Comercio harshly criticizes the choice, Soberón’s academic bonafides and more inclusive approach (he favors eradicating rural poverty before coca plantations, and wants to engage the coca growers movement in the national dialogue about drug policy) may enable the new Peruvian administration to balance their promises of social inclusion with a more comprehensive security policy. For those interested in a more sweeping view of drug policy in the history of U.S.-Peru relations, Paul Gootenberg’s book Andean Cocaine: the Making of a Global Drug is well worth a read.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents usher Fabio Ochoa, Colombian drug kingpin, to an awaiting vehicle following his extradition from Colombia to Florida, September 8, 2001(Courtesy Reuters).

One of the heralded lessons of Colombia’s fight against drug cartels is that fragmentation reduces violence. The vertical command structures of the famed Medellín and Cali cartels were legendary. Their pseudo-celebrity leaders lived extravagantly, socialized widely, and often died violently. They spent billions to buy off politicians, judges, and business leaders, and they spent more to assassinate adversaries they couldn’t buy, chasing their targets not just all over Colombia but the world. The country became, for a time, the most violent place on earth, the nationwide homicide rate topping 80 per 100,000 in 1991.

But a couple of decades later, the drastic levels of violence have fallen, the motorcycle assassins disappeared, the car bombs ended. The conventional story goes something like this: the killing first of Pablo Escobar and then the arrest and conviction of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers fragmented the cartels and their command structures. From the ruins of the once centralized cartels sprang smaller – and less vicious – criminal organizations. While cocaine production and distribution (which hasn’t changed much) continued, violence fell.

A U.S. law enforcement official once told me that their antidrug strategy in Mexico was first to go after the wolves (the highest level cartel leaders), then go after the snakes (the next level down), and then clean up the remaining rats. The odd animal analogy aside, this strategy seems straight out of Colombia’s playbook.

Mexico has, in fact, done this fairly successfully. Of the 37 thugs on its Most Wanted list, 21 are either behind bars or six feet underground. Where once U.S. and Mexican officials cited four main criminal organizations, today the number has at least doubled, complemented by the rise of many smaller operations and local gangs. But as the Mexican cartels multiplied, violence escalated to all time highs.

Why the difference? Obviously Mexico and Colombia have different histories, and different security problems, so the reasons for divergent outcomes are multiple and complex. Perhaps one issue — seemingly forgotten in the transfer of “lessons learned” —is the direct targeting of the Colombian government by its cartels.  In the early 1990s, at the peak of the violence, one of the biggest points of contention was Colombia’s extradition law. The drug cartels wrote open letters offering to stop the car bombs and assassinations, to retire from the drug business, to even pay off the national debt if extradition to the United States was taken off the table. Denied, the cartels tried to lay down their own version of the law on the nation. Fighting back, Colombian law enforcement slowly gained the advantage, and as these groups fragmented, violence declined.

In Mexico, by contrast, the cartels are not openly and directly confronting the state. Sure, they threaten, co-opt and even increasingly kill local and state police and elected representatives. But their open letters –narcomantas hung over important intersections– are primarily directed to their drug trafficking rivals, or to local political alignments. They don’t often explicitly challenge the national government, much less launch violent “campaigns” against it. Even the most high-profile recent killings – for instance DEA officer Jaime Zapata in San Luis Potosi, the brother of former Chihuahua Attorney General Mario Gonzalez or PRI gubernatorial candidate in Tamaulipas Rodolfo Torre Cantú— the assassinations don’t seem to have come from the top. If the violence isn’t ordered from on high (as it was in Colombia), then taking out the top echelons of the cartels won’t end it. Furthermore, if most of the bloodshed is between the criminals themselves, going after the heads will just escalate the cycle, as more and more mid-level criminals fight it out for control of the remaining business (catching innocent civilians and law enforcement officials in their wake). 

This suggests Mexico should rethink its kingpin strategy — or at least complement it with other approaches. There are many other models out there to consider – the “broken windows” approach (perhaps the other extreme, as it focuses instead on smaller quality of life crimes before building up to the big organized crime rings); community policing models, used to good effect in U.S. cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, New Haven, and elsewhere; or a territorial approach, which integrates neighborhood level policing with other public services, and is already being used in the historic center of Mexico City. These methods may work to raise the social, in addition to the material costs of violence for the criminals.

As Mexico debates the right policy mix in the coming year under Calderón and beyond next July’s presidential elections, the big missing question is how to get Mexican society– the one weapon the cartels can’t match – involved. So far, citizens have been relegated to the status of “clients” or victims. Opening up the security policy to analysis and debate is an important first step.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Miner Gomez celebrates as he arrives on the surface as the ninth to be rescued in Chile (Ho New/Courtesy Reuters).

Today is the one year anniversary of the collapse that buried 33 Chilean miners deep underground for more than two months. Their rescue inspired a jolt of nationalistic pride in Chile, and not a little media fanfare, but now many of the survivors find themselves worse off than before the ordeal. Despite, and in some cases because of their fame (sure to increase with the production of a movie based on their tale), almost half of the 33 are unemployed, and some are back working underground to make ends meet.

Sebastián Piñera’s high hasn’t lasted either – recent polls show his ratings slipped to 31 percent last month, a far cry from his 63 percent approval rate in October 2010. Even the Economist is down on Piñera at this point, criticizing the billionaire for creating ties between government and the private sector that are often too close for comfort.

Dilma Rousseff recently unveiled the “Bigger Brazil Plan”, or “Plano Brasil Maior”, a program designed to make Brazil more competitive and stimulate investment in the face of an increasingly overvalued real and the influx of inexpensive goods from abroad. Some question whether the bill will have any positive effect in the long-run, arguing that the $16 billion in tax cuts for manufacturers will be offset by higher sales taxes, needed to finance recent government spending sprees.

For those that haven’t seen it, this Los Angeles Times four-part series on the Sinaloa cartel is an illuminating profile of the more average citizens involved, the way the business works, and one particular DEA attempt to take down a cartel.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

]]> http://www.latintelligence.com/2011/08/05/reads-of-the-week-chiles-miners-brazils-industrial-policy-and-mexicos-sinaloa-cartel/feed/ 0 http://www.latintelligence.com/2011/08/02/pulling-guatemala-back-from-the-brink/ http://www.latintelligence.com/2011/08/02/pulling-guatemala-back-from-the-brink/#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:55:07 +0000 Shannon http://www.latintelligence.com/?p=1263

Suspects wait at the Supreme Court in Guatemala City (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).

The conventional Guatemalan security story is one of a country riddled with violence, where law enforcement institutions are in shambles and corruption reaches the highest levels of government. Its homicide rate triples that of Mexico, and its notoriously weak rule of law system lets more than 99 percent of criminals walk free. The growing presence of Mexican and Colombian cartels, pushed out of their home countries due to intensive antidrug campaigns, has only made matters worse. As the Zetas in particular move into the northern provinces, observers sound alarm bells about Guatemala’s possible descent into a “narco-state”.

Still, it may be too early to give up on Guatemala. Since the capture of top drug-smuggler Juan Alberto Ortiz-López, alias ‘el Chamalé’, in late March of this year, Guatemalan officials have arrested a number of local gang leaders, some with close ties to the Zetas. Within days of folk singer Facundo Cabral’s murder this month, the authorities announced the arrest of three suspects, presenting a slideshow with a play-by-play rundown of the events.  The swift response became a point of pride for Guatemalans accustomed to sluggish, if any, justice.

The UN International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) can take much of the credit for these improvements. Set up in 2007, the commission has been an enormous boost to law enforcement’s (still limited) capacity; assisting in high-profile investigations and promoting important reforms, notably witness protection and plea bargaining laws. It works in conjunction with domestic security agencies, employing a “learning by doing” model that teaches investigative methods to Guatemalan prosecutors on the job. Not least of all, CICIG played an instrumental role in the appointment of current Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who has had a markedly positive impact on the public prosecutor’s office.

But Paz y Paz and her fellow reformers face an uphill battle. Guatemalans are among the most mistrustful of judicial institutions across Latin America, and the most skeptical of democracy overall. Winning the public’s trust in the justice system requires sustained improvements, not just sporadic high-profile successes. The lack of funding for security poses another major challenge – last year the government cut the public prosecutor’s budget by a quarter. More generally, Guatemala’s tax revenue is the lowest in the region at around 10 percent of GDP (its Central American neighbors are not much better, with this part of the region ranking below the rest of the continent and even Sub-Saharan Africa in tax collection).

The upcoming elections may also stall progress. The presidential frontrunner, Otto Pérez-Molina, is a retired army general with a questionable human rights record and a preference for iron fist, hard-line security policies. While he has promised to respect political appointees’ mandates, many fear that if elected he would replace Paz y Paz and even block the continuation of CICIG’s work beyond its current 2013 deadline. While outsourcing justice is not a long-term solution, banishing the UN commission before it has completed its investigations and trials will handicap efforts to strengthen the rule of law.

For a place that many have already labeled a failed state, the recent advances in security are a ray of hope. A committed Attorney General and external commission have shown that it is possible to make inroads combating organized crime and Guatemala’s pervasive culture of impunity. But to sustain and further these small islands of progress, other branches of government and citizens more generally will have to do their part. The very wealthy will have to pay higher taxes to underpin public security (a point stressed by Hillary Clinton during last month’s Central American security conference). The next president may have to forgo partisan calculations and bolster the justice system, starting with keeping the effective Paz y Paz as chief prosecutor. These are by no means easy steps to take. They require personal sacrifices and the setting aside of self interest for the public good of a stronger state. But if Guatemalans truly want a more stable and secure future, they will have to start making these tough choices. Instead of writing Guatemala off as a lost cause, we should applaud the work of a few courageous reformers and encourage the rest of the country to follow their lead.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.