Cardona
MPSA 2004
26
for the police in the current struggle with guerrillas, paramilitaries, and drug traffickers.
This trend fits into an overall movement to make the conflict exclusively military, which
dates from the end of the Rojas Pinilla regime (UNDP 2003: 38-39).
It appears, then, that policy-makers in the wake of La Violencia faced a
fundamental trade-off with respect to the institutional design of the public forces. They
could either allow the politicization of the police to continue—with predictably grim
results, given the nature of the current conflict—or they could put the civilist mission of
the institution at risk by affiliating it with the army and the Ministry of War/Defense.
What is notable in the Colombian context is the fact that both a military and a civilian
president made similar choices with respect to this trade-off within a few years of each
other: the former affiliating the police with the Ministry of Defense, and the latter
bringing the particularly politicized municipal and departmental police under the purview
of the national leadership, now affiliated with the military through the Ministry of
Defense, and providing salaries from the national level rather than the local level.
Conclusion
What appears clear from the foregoing is that the highly contested and relatively
balanced nature of the struggle for partisan dominance played an important role in
shaping both the effects of institutional design of the public forces, and subsequent
choices about how to respond to those effects when they generated negative social
outcomes under La Violencia. This close interrelationship among partisan affiliation,
localized political struggle, and the institutional affiliation of the police suggests that we
as we seek to understand the complexities of societies in conflict, we would do well to
Convention