Private Security in Guatemala: Pathway to Its Proliferation

It has become common to explain the proliferation of private security services as causally determined by crime rates and institutional weakness. This article on the contrary argues that other explanatory factors need to be emphasised, especially for post‐war societies: institutional trajectories and political processes. The article first presents the present situation of commercial and non‐commercial private security services in Guatemala (private security companies as well as security neighbourhood committees). Against this background it reconstructs mechanisms and critical junctures through which the Guatemalan state had sourced out policing functions to the private sector during the war and traces the reinforcement of these mechanisms in post‐war society. It argues that the proliferation of private security services is an outcome of the reinforcing of an institutional pattern of public security displacement to the private sphere. The continuity of self‐defence and vigilante organisations thereby emerges as a stronger explanatory factor of the proliferation of private security services in post‐war societies than their self‐explained authorisation through high crime rates.