By: Staff Writer
November 3, 2023
A recent report conducted by IBI Consultants for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund found that the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras) along with Nicaragua is seeing an increase in military build up after years of demilitarisation.
The report said: “In the 1990s, the negotiations that ended the region’s three civil wars brought the first steps toward real democratic reforms, allowing Central America to pivot away from the civil wars, revolutionary struggles, and bloody proxy battles of the Cold War. Each country turned to building new, fragile liberal democratic institutions. Comprehensive structural, constitutional and doctrinal reforms to the military as an institution were rightly understood to be foundational for building more inclusive, equitable societies with functioning institutions governed by the rule of law and subject to democratic norms.
“Today, the once-hopeful foundation is eroding, fueling rising authoritarianism and parallel crisis of legitimacy, rising human rights abuses, massive corruption, deinstitutionalization, and waves of migration to the United States and elsewhere to escape the new, destructive return to the past. It increasingly drives scarce resources to militaries that have no credible external threat to combat.”
The stakes are high in Central America as the once seemingly stabilising democratic reforms are now being eroded by this rise authoritarianism along with the erosion of democratic institutions.
The report added: “Despite these stakes, U.S. policymakers and other regional stakeholders barely reference remilitarization as a root cause of the region’s crisis. The Biden administration has unveiled three major strategies that could and should address the phenomenon yet none even mentioned the return of the militaries to prominent roles in internal security, economic development, and political interference as fostering authoritarianism.
“In every country, the current situation culminated in watershed events that consolidated the remilitarization paradigm. At each rupture point, the military and the elites strengthened their alliance through each side’s willingness to protect the other and reknit the old model. In each case the military reaped enormous economic benefits, in increased budgets and access to profits from key civilian sectors of the economy.”
This reliance on the military, rather than addressing underlying socio-economic problems, has led to a policy driven by the understanding that the solutions to the growing social problems and high crime rates are a problem of territorial occupation by state forces, leading to more violence and minimizing the potential impact of non-violent policy initiatives.
The military has not and cannot solve any of Central America’s problems, it is a model of an era of bygone Revolution that is not needed for the 21st Century. To return to it would be walking back all of the blood and hard work these countries have done to get to some level of peace and stabilisation.
The report noted: “In El Salvador we see the military playing a key and unconstitutional role in the mass arrests of 53,000 alleged gang members carried out during the ongoing State of Exception invoked by President Nayib Bukele in March 2022. In a time of deep economic depression and Covid pandemic collapse the military is seeing historic increases in its budget and personnel while the now-servile judicial system arbitrarily closes cases of historic human rights abuses that implicate the military.
“In Guatemala the military’s increased role and influence disproportionately impacts indigenous communities and municipalities who live near foreign operated commercial mines benefitting the political elite, as is exemplified in the State of Siege levied on El Estor, Izabal. It also impacts communities living in areas with a significant drug trafficking presence.
“In Honduras, the increased reliance on the military to respond to public security challenges disproportionately impacts communities in Gracias a Dios, Olancho, and along the Caribbean Sea, where drug trafficking thrives in combination with the high concentration of land ownership. Indigenous communities and environmental activists face significant threats as they advocate for hard-won land rights against the desires of the oligarchic group there. The military’s systemic violence against women and targeted harassment of LGBTQ+ individuals, is visible there.
“In Nicaragua, the regime’s chief ally, Russia, has fully embraced the authoritarian practices of the Ortega family and provided both weapons and intelligence equipment to keep the regime in power though the use of force. The armed forces are a key part of the widespread repression while carrying out predatory economic extraction in the mining, timber and fishing industries as the price for loyalty to the regime.”