The privatization of citizen security in Latin America: from elite guards to neighborhood vigilantes.

• Date: 22 September 2007
• Author: Ungar, Mark
• Published date: 22 September 2007
• Author: Ungar, Mark

IN LATIN AMERICA, THE COMBINATION OF DEMOCRATIZATION, NEOLIBERALISM, AND record crime rates has converged to spur such a phenomenal growth in private security that private security guards now outnumber public police officers in nearly every country. Although governments and scholars alike have recognized this growth, there has been very little concerted study of its causes, patterns, and impact. In particular, the issues and conditions of citizen security in countries around the world today mask the extent to which private security has become a part of state and society. This article will develop an analytical framework to understand private security, focusing on Latin America, which has experienced growth of every kind of private security. It will first describe the extent of private security in the region, discuss its main causes, develop a typology of firms, examine three case studies, and highlight its long-term impact.

The Phenomenon in Numbers

Since the 1980s, the number of private security firms has grown exponentially in every region of the world, with expansion estimated at between seven and nine percent in the industrialized countries and about 11% in developing regions such as Latin America, Africa, and Asia (Frigo, 2003: 2). Every Latin American country has experienced such growth. Even in Chile and Costa Rica--the region's two safest countries--the private security sector has grown at an annual rate of about nine to 10% respectively. (1) Though this growth began in the 1980s, most Latin American firms are less than 10 years old. In the Dominican Republic, for example, 47 of the 98 firms registered in the year 2000 were formed since the mid-1990s (Diaz, 2001: 40; Mata, 2004). And while most firms have fewer than 100 employees, an estimated 320 have over 1,000 (Ibid.: 3). As Table 1 below indicates, the larger countries in the region have hundreds of thousands of private security officers, and the smaller ones have tens of thousands. Together, there are approximately 1.6 million registered employees in Latin America, with probably some two million more working informally or illegally.

The constant turnover, tenuous finances, and off-the-books hiring in this sector make such statistics unreliable. High bankruptcy rates resulting from small profit margins and high-interest loans make the number of firms particularly hard to track. Since the bulk of most firms' budgets go to salary, which must be paid regularly, late payment by a major client can push them over the edge. As a result, estimates of the number of firms in many countries vary wildly. For instance, in the 1990s Guatemala had an estimated 15,000 private security officers, but by 2007 estimates ranged from 80,000 to 200,000. (2) Mexico has only 322 private security firms on the federal registry, about 3,000 private security firms in the Federal District, 6,000 in the Mexico City area, and about 1,400 more offering services in two or more states. Estimates of the number of officers range from 140,000 (Economist, January 27, 2007: 33), about 70% of whom are former state police officers, (3) to 450,000, with some 600,000 unregistered ones.

Changing demands and services make the size of the industry difficult to determine and control. When the industry began, most firms provided general services, but increasing sophistication and segmentation have made them the exception. Just as client demand rose for integration--bundling a range of services--the open markets of globalization allowed a few multinational firms to capture a large share of the Latin American market, among them Securitas, Group 4 Securicor (operating in 100 countries, including 22 in Latin America and the Caribbean), Chubb, and Prosegur. In Nicaragua, Wackenhut controls 10% of the private security sector. Only a few firms in Latin America, based in Mexico and Brazil, approach the scale of these large firms.

A Typology of Firms

Efforts to identify and understand private security firms have fallen behind their growth due to their uncertain ownership and shady practices, but also because of the lack of agreement over what constitutes a private security enterprise. To form a definition to serve as the foundation of analysis, this article develops a typology of private security firms based on two key dimensions. The first is mission. The stated and unstated services of non-state agencies range from protection of a specific property to open-ended and usually self-appointed mandates to maintain public order. As economies expand and diversify, so do the services offered by private firms. Such services can be classified into four main categories. One is technical and physical, such as alarm installation, physical reinforcement of buildings, fabrication of locks, new lighting, closed-circuit TV, and provision of firearms. A second is control of physical access, such as gated communities, security during big events, control or administration of prisons, extra security in tourist areas, and checking identity at financial institutions. A third area is training, consulting, and information services, such as risk assessment, computer security, guard training, transport trucks and personnel, media relations, and personal investigation. A fourth, more specialized area is emergencies or high-risk situations such as kidnapping, political crises, and VIP protection.

The second dimension is the level of state involvement, ranging from police departments that provide security for private firms to completely autonomous and clandestine groups. Amid the industry's growth, the private and public security spheres have increasingly overlapped, with public officials acquiring business interests in private firms, oversight by state agencies becoming corrupted, and public security monies going to private use. In many countries, private firms are often hired by--and are probably formed with the express intent to service--local governments. Peru has a national police, for example, but wealthy municipalities in the capital of Lima, such as Miraflores and San Isidro, also hire private security firms. Together, these two dimensions help to capture the complexity of private security in Latin America and other regions.

Though most firms occupy the middle of both dimensions, certain typologies show the direction in which the sector is expanding--and indicate some of the impacts.

1. High State Control and Narrow Mission: Police Moonlighting. In many countries, police work off hours on their own or through state contracts to provide security for private properties such as banks. Even during working hours, as in countries like Ecuador, the police will charge private entities and individuals for security services. In Mexico's Federal District, some 70,000 police officials are assigned primarily to private interests, while only 30,000 are assigned to public functions.

2. High State Control and Broad Mission: Community Policing Units. One of the biggest and most promising citizen security reforms around the world is community policing. Intended to shift policing from the traditional response to incidents of crime toward a more preventive approach based on citizen involvement, community policing is made up of programs such as citizen security councils, protection for vulnerable populations, and neighborhood watch groups. Such programs are state run, but as the case of Bolivia shows, they often become more attached to private interests in their target areas. Since many of the elected neighborhood councils or police units responsible for community policing are weak, the programs often become dominated or controlled by local businesses, cliques of powerful residents, or even drug trafficking and other organized criminal networks.

3. High Private Control and Narrow Mission: Gated Communities. Most private security fits the general characterization of agencies that compete in the marketplace to provide security to private interests with no state connection beyond legal regulations. The most rapidly growing sectors here consist of firms guarding the entrances and common areas of gated communities. These areas primarily feature middle- and high-income residences, with well-known examples such as Rio de Janeiro's wealthy gated beach-front communities. Their growing appeal has witnessed their spread to less affluent and other residential areas, such as urban high-rises and massive new construction projects. The unprecedented growth of such communities in many cities parallels the growth of private security. In Mexico City, for example, about 750 gated communities with about 50,000 housing units were formed between 1990 and 2001 (Parnreiter, 2002).

4. High Private Control and Broad Mission: Most starkly exhibiting how private security fills the vacuum of state control is the phenomenon of vigilantism. Vigilante actions by gangs, death squads, private militias, and other groups have long existed in Latin America, but they are now embedded in the region's democratic regimes. The number of lynchings, and the justifications for them, have risen dramatically since the mid-1990s, even when taking account of better documentation, with about 6,000 killings each year in Latin America (Johnson, 2004). In Guatemala, for example, where 75% of the population supported lynchings (Godoy, 2006: 2), the United Nations documented 482 lynchings between the end of the civil war in 1996 and 2002 (Seider, 2004:81), mostly in areas with the smallest police presence, though not the highest crime rates. Often with the support or collusion of police officers, most vigilante actions are carried out by citizens, from spontaneous gatherings to organized "committees." The targets of such attacks have also expanded, from suspected criminals and "immoral" individuals to state officials such as police officers and mayors, in countries such as Mexico and Peru.

The Sources of Growth

Of the many sources for the expansion of private security in these...