Development: Over the weekend (8-9 October) the government of President Ollanta Humala published two supreme decrees announcing a thorough shake-up of the top ranks of the police and military.
Significance: This is probably the biggest set of promotions and forced retirements to befall the police and military since President Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000)’s and his spy chief’s, Vladimiro Montesinos, fall from power. The move will ensure loyalty to President Humala within the top ranks of the security forces, but it will also put a few noses out of joint, given the scale and the speed with which the changes happened. President Humala’s interior minister, Oscar Valdés Dancuart, announced the purge of 30 national police (PNP) generals.
Separately, Minister of Defence Daniel Mora announced the promotion of 48 military personnel. The names of those shuffled into retirement to make way for the new are yet to be announced. Ten of the 48 military officers promoted are President Humala’s contemporaries, having graduated in the same ‘Promoción 77’ (class of 1977).
Key points:
• Of the existing 45 police generals, only 15 will remain in their post and 30 will be new faces with varying degrees of experience.
• President Humala has either been brave or rash to make military and police changes within days of each other. Putting both the police on the defensive and preparing the army for a similarly sized cull, given last September’s police uprising in neighbouring Ecuador, is a risky strategy. The PNP changes guarantee loyalty, but they also imply a paternalistic relationship between the relatively new executive and the police high-command. Corruption and cronyism have been cited as the reasons behind the shake up.
• Remigio Hernani, former interior minister (2008-2009) during President Alan García’s second term in office (2006-2011), considers the changes to the PNP as “institutional manhandling”. Resentment toward the reform of the PNP’s high-command was always likely given that those individuals pushed into retirement are both those nearing the end of active service as well as those facing corruption investigations. By effectively tarring all 30 of the top level police officers with the same brush (the lists published by the government mouthpiece ‘El Peruano’ does not disaggregate), the Humala administration may have created the basis for a high-level police backlash.
• Lieutenant General Raúl Salazar Salazar will take over from General Raúl Oscar Becerra Velarde as the director of the PNP. Salazar used to run the presidential palace’s security detail.
• The promotion of 48 high-ranking army officials also has caused a stir, mainly because those they will replace have not yet been listed publicly. The move, according to the defence ministry, has been long in the making and an audit of personnel’s track record has been underway for two months. The 48 will begin active service on 1 January 2012.
Pointer: Defence Minister Daniel Mora announced yesterday (10 October) that the army is beginning to recover its military capacity. The purchase of eight MI-171Sh helicopters from Russia is “only the beginning”, said Mora. The fleet is to be used in the fight against Sendero Luminoso in the Valley of the Ene and Apurímac Rivers (Vrae).
