The government of President Otto Pérez Molina recently announced the arrest of five members of a ‘community police’ group in Tejutla, San Marcos, on suspicion of involvement in serious crimes. This has been highlighted as proof that the authorities have not lost control of these organisations, which have grown from 168 in 1999 to 717 in 2011 — without counting the unregistered ones. A study conducted by an institute of the Universidad Rafael Landívar and some NGOs have been claiming the exact opposite.
Local juntas de seguridad (literally ‘security boards’), as these groups are called, were established during the administration of Álvaro Arzú (1996-2000) as crime prevention instruments in localities where police cover was scant. Since then a number of municipalities have coopted them as an autonomous part of their law-enforcement resources. Many of them have recruited people who served as members of the security apparatus during the years of internal conflict. Over time, according to the study conducted by Luis Mario Martínez Turcios, many of them became instruments of vested interests — in some cases, organised crime.
Martínez Turcios says, ‘There are no public security policies, only plans that are modified by each successive interior minister, and the police have not been given enough support, with resources and ‘cleansing’. This is taken advantage of by interest groups who create their own power structures.’ With no local presence of the state, he adds, these groups become autonomous and impose their own norms, with illegal curfews, fines and sanctions. In some cases, they become involved in criminal activities.
The department of San Marcos has 243 officially registered juntas de seguridad, the highest concentration in the country. In Tejutla, the junta is run by the mayor, Humberto Gómez Pérez, who is being investigated on suspicion of having ordered several kidnappings, including those of five police officers and a doctor on 22 May. He is also suspected of having ordered the kidnapping, on 17 June, of 13 officials of the public prosecution service who intended to arrest 21 persons linked to the local junta.
This is not an isolated case. For example, in 2009 in San Juan Cotzal, Quiché, another mayor who controlled a local junta, José Pérez Chen, was accused of ordering arbitrary arrests and of having instigated the lynching of a police officer who had been looking into the activities of his son. Pérez Chen was tried and sentenced to 82 years in prison. There are three officially registered juntas in Quiché.
More recently a junta in Panajachel, Sololá, has been linked to drug traffickers. In late 2011, two journalists covering the situation there received death threats from members of that junta; one for exposing abuses and possible criminal activities, the other for reporting on the arrest of two junta members. There are 23 registered juntas in Sololá.
For all its claims that the juntas are not out of control, the deputy minister for community support, Arkel Benítez, has announced that his office is drafting legislation establishing a new ‘model’ of community police which will be submitted to President Pérez Molina within weeks, and that he has plans to set up pilot ‘violence prevention commissions’: 70 in Villa Nueva and 40 in San Miguel Petapa, two municipalities in Guatemala department which lie south of the capital. These are expected to act as ‘early alert’ instruments. There are already 73 registered juntas in Guatemala department.
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