Private security is good business in Guatemala

murders have grown by 145 percent to 6,498 killings in 2009, according to UN statistics.

Fieser notes that the demand for private security, and the consequent emergence of security guard companies actually predated — or at least ran concurrent with — the rise in violence. The civil war, which began in 1960 and pitted leftist guerrillas against the state, saw police officers target activists and suspected dissidents, who were often abducted and murdered. The military and death squads, meanwhile, terrorized indigenous Mayan communities. By 1996, 200,000 Guatemalans had been killed or disappeared, according to a UN truth commission.

The 1996 peace accords dismantled the police force and replaced it with a new entity, the National Civil Police. It has traditional policing duties, but the force is under-trained, underpaid, and, in many cases, corrupt. Earlier this month, the police chief and drug czar were arrested for alleged involvement in drug trafficking. It was the second time in two years the police chief had been removed under criminal allegations.

The end of the war also brought scores of multinational security companies to the country. A 2008 national police list of security companies obtained by GlobalPost under the Guatemalan equivalent of a freedom of information law, shows that before 1990, only twenty-one registered security companies existed. During the relatively calm 1990s — after war combed had died out and before street and violent crime began to spike — 56 companies set up operations in the country. This led to the mushrooming of foreign and Guatemalan-owned companies, both legal and illegal, that continues today.

Mark Ungar, a professor of criminal justice and political science at Brooklyn College who has studied the effect of the security forces, told Fieser that this is a common tale. While Latin American countries “tried to establish democracies, you started seeing concerns over the new government’s ability to maintain security,” said. “And the emergence of these companies is rooted in that.”

U.S. security giant g4s — previously known as Wackenhut Corp. — employs more guards than any other company in Guatemala. It registered with the government in 1980 and today employs about 5,300 guards that it outsources to clients.

Max Heurtematte, regional vice president for the company, told Fieser that problems have arisen because the government has no control over the system. The government needs to make sure “that the guards speak Spanish, by giving a basic language test … and that they are mature enough to handle the responsibility. For that, we need a basic psychological evaluation,” Heurtematte said. The company provides fifty hours of training to new employees, half dedicated to firearms training.

The government is creating a program to oversee the security firms, according to records. A police spokesman declined to discuss the new initiative, but a 26 November 2009 letter from the Interior Ministry said the police have been ordered to “implement a plan to supervise and monitor, at a national level, all private security companies.”

Such a plan would include identifying which companies are legal and registering the guns and equipment they use.

Currently even security companies registered with the government are not required to put their employees through a criminal background check. Using unregistered guns, guards are sometimes involved in shootouts.

Fieser notes that since the guards are poorly paid — normally at the minimum wage of $2,750 a year, or sometimes less — some of them also turn to crime. “This is one of the biggest security problems in the country,” said Raul Monzon, a deputy in the government’s human rights office. “Little training exists, they don’t know how to use a gun and they are everywhere.”

The guards are twice as likely to be killed than the average citizen. Last year, 107 security guards and bodyguards were killed, according to statistics from human rights groups.

“The guards and the guns they wield — pump action shotguns and old revolvers — mark the front doors of businesses and the guard gates of wealthy neighborhoods. They have become accepted members of a culture numb to crime,” Fieser writes.

Professor Ungar says: “Can you imagine walking into a Guatemala City shopping mall and not seeing a guard? People wouldn’t know what to do…. Guards have become a social phenomenon. They are part of the fabric of urban life.”