It's kind of odd around here. There are tons of military people, but very few police officers. I think I've seen a total of three police cars, and two motorcycles in the month I've been here. Most of the police actually can be seen in banks (and they're armed with really big guns, too, it's a little scary). I'm pretty sure it's illegal to photograph military installations so, well, I haven't.It's not that neighbourhoods are unsafe to live in, far from. It's really common to see little wooden buildings, about the size and shape of outhouses, on the side of the street. I wondered what they were for, for a while, then I realized that they were for security guards to hang out in when it
rained. At night (and other times too, I guess), a guard sits near his little box, and watches the cars and the houses nearby for signs of unsavory activity. They like to blow their whistle a lot too, and for a while I wondered why - but it's so that would-be criminals know that there's a guard around. The houses nearby all get together and pay a little bit of money to keep the guard around.Even more scary is the neighbourhood in which my work is. I think the sign speaks for itself: "warning: armed vigilante community."
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Okay, so in Latin America, the structure of the police and military are different than in Canada. The police and the military are one in the same in LatAm. There are different subsections of police (Argentina has "Tourist Police"), but they all report to the army. So you can't tell the difference between the two sometimes, and in poorer areas, the military is it.
Since the police and the military are both the same, if one doesn't trust the government to take care of them, it's time to take matters into one's own hands. Thus begat the private security forces who protect specific people, buildings or neighbohoods. There is no equivalent that I am aware of in Canada. The trouble with private security forces is that they get too big for their britches, and become private armies. In Columbia, they are known as "paramilitaries," and are really bad.
The States, by the way, splits the police up even finer, with additional layers of sherrifs, highway patrol, and others. This guarantees no centralized control of the legal armed security forces, meaning it would be hard to organize a military coup in Conneticut. But easy in Chile.
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