In Tribute to Facundo Cabral
“There is nothing new except what has been forgotten” (Madeimosille Bertin, dressmaker to Marie Antoinette).
Gradually Central America is slipping precariously toward the philosophical and conceptual recycling of the disgraceful and undemocratic doctrine of National Security, direct daughter of the Cold War and the favorite instrument of interventionist powers, military juntas and oligarchies coup in Latin America second half of the twentieth century.
Of course, this old ideology looms now under the new mantle and term “Regional Security”, and instead of openly proclaiming the “citizen control” as a central axis, as happened once, now begins to be shaped under the emphasis of “territorial control”, under the assumption that both terrorism and drug trafficking and organized crime in general, are strengthened by the physical absence and low geographical deployment of security and defense bodies of the Central American states, a truth middle incomplete.
These deductions are derived largely due to some of the proposals that emerged during the Central American Security Conference, which took place at the end of June just past, with the participation of some 50 countries, many of them represented high-level delegations.
That summit is highlighted first, alms, as he called the Guatemalan journalist Haroldo Shetemul (1), which was presented to the U.S. through the announcement personally by Mrs. Hillary Clinton, that his country contribute U.S. $ 200 million as a donation to support the American fight against organized crime, a sum certainly extremely ridiculous, especially if one takes into account the magnitude of the responsibility of that country of drug trafficking, and that the nation consumes 83% of the drugs transiting Central America, and considering also that only the cocaine market is a gross sales of $ 35 billion (2).
At that summit that was the main concrete contribution by the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of psychotropic substances. For its part, Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, delivered his main proposal to combat organized crime and drug trafficking in Central America, providing assistance to governments in the region as support and advice on the modernization and technological support for Central American armed forces, as the establishment of centers include polygraph, gun control, money laundering and approval of criminological basis (3).
Less than fifteen days after the meeting held, the U.S. returns to the fray with a proposal that goes in the direction of Colombia. Now that country announces through the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, the U.S. first use of unmanned aircraft to monitor the border between the U.S. and Mexico, from California to Texas (4).
In other words, turns their eyes to the militarization and control citizen, replicating the same answer that Washington and the ruling elites of Central America used in the seventies and eighties, decades of civil wars, internal armed conflicts, executions systematic campaign of killings and targeted political assassinations and mass by irregular forces and illegal paramilitary and parastatal.
In essence, today, behind the growing insecurity and widespread violence that is experienced equally in most of Central America, has the same underlying problem that fueled the intense political bloodletting of recent past, it was (and is) the problem the loss of state hegemony in the exercise of legitimate violence.
Currently the main strength of organized crime that operates in Central America lies in its increasing ability to contend for hegemony in the state that the use of coercion.