The topic for this webinar is "The Role of Security Forces in Central America in the Age of COVID-19"
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The purpose of this research is to determine, from a systemic perspective, how the activities of organized crime in the country are affecting its governance and governability. The author proposes that: Currently in El Salvador organized crime (OC) in its eagerness to increase its profits, control of trafficking routes and markets has become a strategic actor whose activities are affecting the country's governance and governability by destabilizing its political, economic and social spheres. This research presents a comprehensive study of the dynamics in which OC networks are immersed and the negative effects of their activities in El Salvador. At the same time, it identifies the vulnerabilities of the Salvadoran state, as well as the weak points through which these nefarious organizations are permeating its structures and institutions. The author concludes by saying that the Salvadoran State, despite its efforts, does not respond to the requirements and security needs of the population and that the continuation of this course will lead it to gradually lose legitimacy, until it enters a crisis of governability. He proposes that the way to overcome this vicious dynamic is to resort to all available resources, including private security, duly controlled and regulated.
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The provision of private security services challenges conventional wisdom about the role of the State as the guarantor of public security. Taking into account the weakness or absence of effective legal structures and regulating entities, such non-state activities pose serious questions about lawfulness, legitimacy, and responsibility in the security area. If the security provided by police forces is not reliable, citizens will tend to resort to private security services (PSS) or to supply themselves with arms in order to protect themselves, speeding up the decline of state monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In El Salvador, PSS monitoring and control focus on this area. By means of systematically analyzing the phenomenon, its main elements and the dynamic interrelationship among them are presented as a means of determining whether the system provides the required levals of transparency and the democratic standards regarding the operations and behavior of the PSS. The research presented is aimed at bringing Salvadoran expertise in these matters into the debate on PSS monitoring and control, a useful exercise in part because it shows, from the vantage point of primary sources, the Salvadoran experience with systems of monitoring and control.
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