From Exodus to Exitus Causes of post-war violence in El ... - eDoc

24 Heidrun Zinecker
old police force, and 60 % independent police officers. This was a unique achievement, at
least in Latin America to date. The Academia Nacional de Seguridad Pública (ANSP) was
founded, which candidates for the new police force had to attend. However, demobilization
of the old police force and other security bodies created a security vacuum while the
new ones were not yet established. It was not until one year and two months after the
peace accords that the new police force began operating in the first department (Chalatenango).
Unlike the police, the judiciary did not play a significant role in the transition. The fusion
of the three powers and politicization of the judiciary persisted after the peace accord
as well. However the peace negotiations and constitutional reforms of 1991-92 reinforced
the independence of the judiciary, even though the latter underwent less reform during
the transition process than the army and the police (Díaz 1995: 138).
Phase 2
This transition phase began under the presidency of Calderón Sol and ended under President
Francisco Flores. The institutions of the new security sector were now essentially in
place, and the immediate violent (political) after-pains of the war had come to an end.
Consequently, the level of violence fell, also because the partial and repressive institutional
reform and centralization of security policy along with the counter-reforms in penal legislation,
which were the response to the continuing problem of violence, which although
considerably lower was still at quite a high level, had just got underway, and so had not yet
wrought their devastating effect.
The phase was heralded by the adoption of the Ley Transitoria de Emergencia contra la
Delincuencia law on 19 March 1996. The law had a period of application lasting two years
and served to introduce an unconstitutional state of emergency. At the same time, new
laws were brought in, under which the sentence customary up until then for such offences
was increased by a third, or even two thirds for members of the police force. Young people
aged between 14 and 18 years were supposed to receive sentences which might extend
for up to a seven-year prison sentence. This amounted to an abuse of the UN Convention
for the Rights of Children. In 1997 reforms were adopted for the modification of Article
24 of the constitution, which curtailed citizens’ privacy. Letters could now be read by state
employees, and telephones could be bugged. In 1998 a new penal legislation was adopted.
It already demonstrated a strong tendency to apply laws that were originally designed with
organized crime in mind to normal delinquency (Martínez Ventura 2005: 358f.). Undercover
investigators, house searches, and arrests without judicial orders, along with the
seizure of property, were now legally permitted. Since 2001, the year of the contrareforma,
there has been a further tightening of criminal justice and the code of criminal procedure
is beginning to make itself felt. The maximum sentence was raised to 75 years, and provisional
arrests became the rule rather than the exception, counter to the American Convention
on Human Rights. This was quite apart from the fact that illegal arrests under the
false accusation of opposing the authority of the state became the order of the day, so as to
meet quotas.