Demilitarization and Security in El Salvador and Guatemala: Convergences of Success and Crisis

Abstract

For most of the past quarter-century, social scientists endeavoring to analyze the prolonged crises afflicting the Central American region shared a common problematic: how to explain the extraordinary range of variation in political processes within a confined and relatively homogeneous geographic space. For the majority of scholars, independent of their political outlooks, the analytical task was to identify the mix of variables that might simultaneously explain Costa Rica's democratic stability, Nicaragua's revolution, civil war in El Salvador that was not quite a revolution, Guatemala's insurgency and repression that was not quite a civil war, and none of the above in Honduras (see, inter alia, Brockett 1998; Vilas 1995; Torres Rivas 1993; Williams 1986). Among the many dramatic changes of the last decade of the twentieth century, therefore, the political panorama of Central America provides another: the challenge of accounting for convergence and similarity rather than divergence and variation. The two exemplary processes in this regard (and for Latin America in general, not just Central America) are democratic transitions and market-oriented economic policies (Korzeniewicz and Smith 1996; Smith et al. 1994). Not that national and local differences in culture and social structure have dissolved or ceased to matter, of course; but in many ways, the Central American countries today are as noteworthy for what unites them as for what divides them. The themes of this essay, demilitarization and security, fit well in the new context of convergence. Contemporary security challenges are similar from one end of Central America to the other; this essay will argue that the Salvadoran and Guatemalan cases correspond to a new model of public security that is widely shared across Latin America. The more localized processes of demilitarization in the two countries, moreover, appear to share a similar dynamic, once allowances are made for a five-year offset in the signing of the respective peace accords. Any effort to examine the reasons for these wider processes of convergence would go well beyond the scope of this work, but they are worth noting as a means of locating a discussion of security issues in close relationship to other aspects of contemporary Central American development. Too often, discussions of security issues such as demilitarization or civil-military relations proceed as if they were self-contained