Questioning the Military

Jorge Luis Sierra, who is far from a knee-jerk anti-military analyst, closed his column yesterday with the following:

As if [the recent batch of reports documenting military abuses] weren't enough, the government persists in its pattern of replacing police forces with the armed forces. Of course, the police lack the firepower and they are in large part corrupted by drug traffickers, but the remedy can't continue being worse than the disease itself. A policy that doesn't bring effective results and that provokes undesired results with regard to human rights and institutional strength of the armed forces isn't worth it. It's preferable to have patience and formulate more effective policies than take the rule of law to the edge of a cliff.