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El Salvador THE SECURITY FORCES
Historical Background
In the early post-colonial period, the primary function of
police forces was to enforce, at the behest of local authorities
of towns and communities, an 1825 law on vagrancy in order to
ensure an adequate supply of labor for the large landowners. New
regulations issued in 1855 established a state-subsidized
regional "rural police" force, whose roving inspectors were to
patrol the highways and countryside and to penalize offenders for
minor offenses by fining or jailing them.
Salvadoran police structures, including the National Police
(Policia Nacional--PN), which was founded in 1867, developed in
the later part of the nineteenth century for the purpose of
assuming most of the internal security functions that the urbanbased militia or army had been performing. In 1883 San Salvador
set up a permanent professional police corps of 100 men and 18
officers and administrators. As a result of the liberal
government's measures to deprive the Indian population of their
land, expanded police forces were needed to deal with the growing
Indian unrest. An 1888 legislative decree authorized the
formation of a rural mounted police corps for the prosperous
coffee-growing areas of western El Salvador, principally the
departments of Ahuachapan, Sonsonate, and Santa Ana.
A national urban police system developed concurrently with
the rural National Guard (Guardia Nacional--GN). By the end of
1906, the full-time police forces of the other major cities were
linked administratively to the San Salvador police. President
Manuel Araujo established the basis of a professional law
enforcement system in 1912 when he appointed a Spanish army
captain as commander of all the permanent civil police
organizations. The captain formed a national police corps of
1,200 officers and men and developed a training program.
The evolution of the rural police system culminated in 1912
when two Spanish officers formed a Salvadoran version of the
Spanish Civil Guard called the GN. Placed under the operational
control of the Ministry of Government and Development, the
guard's black-helmeted troops were organized specifically to
defend coffee and fruit plantations from thousands of peasants
evicted from what had been communal properties. Although the main
duty of the GN was to control the rural population, it also
enforced petty agrarian provisions and kept records on personnel
employed by plantations. Thus, many GN units--like their army
counterparts--acted as private armies for the large landowners.
The Treasury Police (Policia de Hacienda--PH), formed in 1926,
functioned mainly as a frontier guard and customs force. Its
initial mission was primarily to prevent campesinos from
producing chicha, the local version of corn liquor.
In January 1932, a month after taking power, Martinez ordered
his security forces to use indiscriminate violence to suppress a
rural revolt in western El Salvador organized by the newly
established Communist Party of El Salvador (Partido Comunista de
El Salvador--PCES). The GN and Civic Guard (Guardia Civica), a
newly created civilian militia, thereupon massacred, by most
historical accounts, approximately 30,000 peasants, trade
unionists, and opposition members in la matanza and
captured and executed the communist leader, Agustin Farabundo
Marti
(see The Coffee Republic
, ch. 1).
The Martinez regime refined a system of stricter control of
the rural population by developing the rural security forces,
including the Civic Guard, with units in each of more than 2,000
local communities. After the rebellion, Civic Guard units
functioned as a private militia for wealthy families and military
commanders. The regime based its new security measures largely on
existing legislation and the Agrarian Code, which it revised in
1941 in order to set down guidelines for law enforcement and the
regimentation of rural life. The basic organization of the
security system as established by Martinez operated with little
modification until the 1980s. The Revolution of 1948, however,
reversed the subordination of the army to the security services
and disbanded the Civic Guard. The three police forces thereafter
assumed primary responsibility for internal security.
In the early 1960s, some Salvadoran officers of an extreme
rightist orientation formed paramilitary organizations to assist
the army and GN in fighting subversion with unconventional and
illegal methods
(see Right-Wing Extremism
, this ch.). The GN's
Colonel Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano helped found the Nationalist
Democratic Organization (Organizacion Democratica Nacionalista--
Orden). By the mid-1960s, Orden was a well-established,
nationwide network of peasant informants and paramilitary forces,
with a unit in most villages. Local army commanders supervised
these units in coordination with GN commanders. Recruits came
primarily from the army reserve system, and the GN provided most
of their training. Orden units performed regular patrolling
duties in their local areas, served as an informant network, and
attempted to inculcate an anticommunist doctrine among the rural
population. With the support of President Fidel Sanchez
Hernandez, its "supreme chief," and Medrano, its "executive
director," the organization expanded its role in the late 1960s
to include involvement in civic action and development projects.
Because of the influence of some of the more zealous GN
intelligence officers, however, Orden deteriorated into an
undisciplined and even ruthless militia of between 50,000 and
100,000 members. After Medrano's removal from power in 1970,
Orden's status was reduced from official to semiofficial by
removing it from direct presidential control.
By the early 1970s, an extensive paramilitary organization
utilizing the structure and personnel of Orden supplemented the
traditional security system. Although the reformist coalition
that seized power in October 1979 issued decrees to outlaw and
disband Orden that November, the organization apparently was
abolished in name only. In 1976 a new civil defense law had
established a system to assist in national emergencies and to
counter attempts at rural insurgency. The membership of the new
civil defense units that were finally organized in 1981
reportedly tended to overlap with that of Orden. The main purpose
of the new civil defense units was to serve as local self-defense
militia and to repel guerrilla attacks on villages. By the late
1980s, the Salvadoran Army claimed to have organized 21,000 civil
defense troops in 319 communities, with another 10,000 troops in
training. Despite being lightly armed and poorly trained, the
civil defense troops were an important supplement to the thinly
stretched army.
Data as of November 1988
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