57 Another academic investigation on the topic was conducted by Patricia Arias, who trying to analyze the dilemmas posed by the scarce regulatory framework on private security in Latin America, was able to suggest an approximate number of personnel employed by the private security industry in Colombia in 2007. Her work was incorporated into a broader project published by Small Arms Survey, which identified that in Colombia, the number of PSC personnel exceeded amply the total number of police officers (Florquin, 2007, p. 104-112). These studies provide interesting information regarding the magnitude of the domestic private security industry, but they do not offer any indication concerning the impact of the industry on the national economy or on the country’s political environment.
58 included in any academic study. Therefore, with the current evolution of PMSC, scholarly work on militarization should expand its scope of study and incorporate this private industry of private military and security services into every thorough analysis hereafter conducted.
Militarization in Latin America after the Second World War could be divided into two separate groups. The studies of the modernization school appeared first, and most of them alleged that military forces encouraged modernization and development. The second wave of academic research contradicted those findings and argued that military spending and militarization in general had a negative effect on democracy, equity, and economic growth. The latter group strongly criticized the modernization school since in their studies they used Military Participation Ratios as the causal variable on a universal basis and overlooked that militaries from different regions were substantially different from each other, especially those military institutions raised in Latin America. Proof of the uniqueness of the Latin American military forces confirmed the analytical mistake committed by modernization researchers and strengthened the results of authors of the second wave such as Kirk Bowman.
The second part of the chapter focused on literature regarding PMSC. It emphasized that militarization has been inversely related to the rise of the private industry of military and security services: PMSC arose in a demilitarization context.
Those arguments concentrate on three main factors. The first one is related to the downsizing of the defense sector after the Cold War, mainly a reduction in budget and
59 administrative tasks. The second one refers to a decrease in the amount of military personnel within the military and police forces of the majority of states around the world.
The third one concerns the high salaries offered by the private sector in contrast to the low wages that characterized the public security sector. In this way, demilitarization increased the supply of trained workforce which became easily absorbed by a growing demand of private actors immersed in the private military business.
Due to the rapid evolution of the industry of PMSC, the security sector had to face certain unexpected challenges for which it was not prepared. The reviewed literature demonstrated that the industry is not properly regulated, its responsibility over violations of human rights is unclear, it may increase social inequality, and excessive reliance on it may weaken the provision of public security. However, foreign PMSC were introduced in Colombia to strengthen the fight against illegal drug trafficking and to collaborate on counter-insurgent operations – and by the way, became additional instruments of U.S. foreign policy in the country. Likewise, a domestic industry of private security companies emerged and developed so quickly that in less than two decades the number of employees of the industry exceeded the total number of police personnel in the country.
The reviewed literature presented a complete state of the art of militarization in Latin America and PMSC in Colombia. At the same time, it exposed the academically intriguing situation that this dissertation analyses and also revealed certain gaps that
60 have not been properly addressed by existing scholarly work. On the one hand, it was argued that PMSC emerged in a demilitarization context, but in Colombia, foreign and domestic private security companies developed in a militarization environment. In this sense, the fact that a private security industry emerged in the country while the state strengthened its national armed forces suggests that other factors different from militarization or demilitarization motivated its growth. Perhaps the internal security challenges that have affected the country for decades have triggered an increasing demand for security that the national armed forces have not been able to fulfill by themselves; according to the reviewed literature, this is true at least for the presence of foreign PMSC in Colombia.
On the other hand, while contemporary literature affirmed that militarization in Latin America had a negative effect on development, the levels of democracy in Colombia have remained stable and the country has shown positive indicators of economic growth, despite of the militarization environment of the last two decades. This situation proves that militarization does not necessarily harm democracy and economic growth. Furthermore since the domestic private security industry emerged at the same time as the country strengthened its national armed forces, it may be possible that the presence of private security providers fulfilled security demands that promoted a stable political and economic atmosphere and mitigated the negative effects indicated by regional militarization studies.
61 3 Research Design