Caused serious distortions and greatly weakened the institutions in charge of public security

Just getting around to reading the UCA Executive Summary of The Situation of Security and Justice 2009-2014 - Between expectations for change, heavy-handed military and gang truces. Glad to see that they didn't pull any punches concerning the militarization of public security under President Mauricio Funes. The increased role for the military is hard to separate from the 2012 gang truce, but I wonder which was will end up doing more harm to the country. I supported the gang truce but had serious problems with the government's involvement / lack of involvement and its inability to move to stage two (to transform the truce into a peace).

The study reveals there was an abrupt change away from the approach to strategic security initially proposed, which was progressively put aside for measures that were short-term and aimed at the media, such as increasing the number of military troops involved in security work, and a greater use of force. This led to a falling into the inertia of continuing the populist-punitive approaches that have prevailed in the administration of security, and hindered the advances toward professionalizing and modernizing the institutions in charge of security at the onset of the administration's term. 

A statistic that reveals this shift that the Funes Administration made is the 253% rise in the number of military troops involved in security work during the first year of his administration, an unprecedented increase in the post-war period. Furthermore, the president expanded the attributions and competencies of the Armed Forces in other areas such as penitentiary security and border security, and he authorized their participation in security plans for public transportation, for security in schools, and in different crime fighting and prosecuting tasks, with no subordination to the police. This afforded the military broad discretion with which they progressively took control of security operations in other key settings, such as the international airport, customs and borders, immigration and foreign services, to name a few. Likewise, the National Defense budget allocation grew 20.4 million dollars in the last five years, and the number of military troops in the Armed Forces increased by 40% between 2009 and 2012, this is in contrast to the progressive reduction in spending and troops proposed in the Peace Accords. 

The prominent role given to the military at the forefront of internal security – that had been reverted by political reform two decades before – reached its maximum expression when general Munguía Payés was formally appointed the head of the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, and general Salinas at the National Civil Police. Before their appointments they had been Minister of National Defense and Head of the Armed Forces, respectively. This decision went against the police reform proposed in the Peace Accords, whose core had been the demilitarization public security. It violated the constitution, which establishes that a civilian should lead the National Civil Police. 

All this, set the stage for the military to take on unprecedented relevance and it positioned itself in the public view as a sector that was indispensable for solving the problems of crime in the country, in which negotiation with the gangs had a key part. These decisions caused serious distortions and greatly weakened the institutions in charge of public security, particularly the National Civil Police, by mixing conflicting approaches, interrupting the professionalization processes that had started and reversing the removal of bad elements in the police that the previous authorities had started, generating effects that were adverse, and counterproductive in the institutional culture that take time to rever