1. Why has the Government of El Salvador decided to pursue to violence prevention?

Since the end of 2009, the Government of El Salvador (GOES) has been incorporating violence and crime prevention as one of the main axes of the National Justice, Public Security and Civil Coexistence Policy (PNJSPC). Since then, it has implemented different initiatives in this area. There is a National Violence Prevention Strategy that has been approved, and it has been expanded by the new National Public Security and Civil Coexistence Policy, which the 2015-2019 government plan takes up with greater force. There is now a national prevention plan for central government institutions.

To reduce the multicausal phenomenon of violence and crime, the government seeks to implement strategies and plans as comprehensive solutions to be constructed from the municipal to the national level, with the capacity and representativeness to be able to incorporate and conjugate the diverse local interests with the national interest. This would work to incentivise broad citizen participation that would contribute to improving the conditions for the development of the Salvadoran nation, for which violence and crime represent a major challenge. A reflection of this effort is the creation and implementation of the National Council on Citizen Security and Civil Coexistence (CNSCC). This mainly consists of the central government, but also includes different political, business, and religious sectors, bringing them together in a process of integration of social and community sectors in implementation in the territories that has produced a plan called Safe El Salvador.

Both the national policy and the Safe El Salvador plan dedicate the greatest number of actions to the violence prevention component. At the moment, priority is being given to certain municipalities as well as sectors of these with the objective of focusing efforts on the territories. The aforementioned requires, and will increasingly require, a degree of coordination and articulation of the actions at the inter-agency and intersectoral level in the territory. This is an aspect the central government, through its regulatory entity—the Ministry of Justice and Public Security—is pursuing by creating a national prevention system over the next few years so that this becomes institutionalised as a state policy in the area of violence prevention.

2. The Government of El Salvador today has the Policy, the Strategy, and a Violence Prevention Plan, as well as a technical-administrative structure to execute violence and crime prevention actions. What is the main challenge in implementing these instruments?

The main challenge is the construction and consolidation of a Citizen Security System, under which to group the other strategies, which have been grouped according to the field of intervention.

The perspective in which we are advancing is that of territorialisation and focusing of the actions, based on coordination between the State and society, to make citizen security and democracy more robust, in addition to improving the population's quality of life.

One key aspect in implementation of the National Prevention Strategy and the Security Policy is the role of the municipal governments in matters ranging from organisation of the municipal violence prevention committees to the preparation of municipal diagnoses of risk factors, and the preparation and implementation of municipal prevention plans. We now have 87 municipalities that have these instruments, representing a third of the municipalities in El Salvador.

This means deploying an action that is concerted and coordinated between the central government, the local governments, and citizens to reduce the risk factors and increase the protection factors in diverse territories and populations that are especially affected by violence and crime. There is currently no technical-administrative structure with the level that this effort requires, the one we have is still very weak, but, even so, progress had been made. But it is not equal to the challenge, so strengthening this structure, updating and adapting it to the new challenge, these are the next steps that will be taken as part of the construction of what will become the national prevention system.

You can't start from the position that just one technical-administrative structure will be able to assume this enormous mission, and so our vision is focused on the national strategy, which proposes a multi-level and inter-agency intervention in which the key is governing leadership and a structure more based on coordination, monitoring of the respective indicators, and evaluation of the results.

3. What did EUROsociAL contribute to this process?

The support EUROsociAL provided to the GOES through the Ministry of Justice and Public Security involved significant technical support in violence prevention training, and support to the work of the Violence Prevention Sub-cabinet, all of which contributed to strengthening some capacities of the staff of the governing institution and to the development of territorial intervention methodologies, and supported public policies aimed at prevention.

4. How does the government plan to inculcate this paradigm shift towards prevention in Salvadoran society?

It's necessary to move away from a classic view of security so that Salvadoran citizens understand the problem of violence from the perspective of human rights and equality. This requires recognition that violence not only affects people's right to non-interference but also involves basic issues of social harmony and trust, which are achieved with citizen participation under the principle of co-responsibility.

It means an effort to construct in the collective and media imagination the vision that repression and heavy-handed policies, far from having resolved the problem of insecurity, have actually produced more violence. That the right action would be comprehensive and one in which prevention plays a key role, with results that might very well be short-term but that make their main contribution in the medium term.

Because of this, the key is citizen participation based on building the social fabric and in which the main control of the territory depends on the citizen's themselves, from their own communities. No strategy with good results that resolve the situation can be expected without the participation of the community. That's why it's significant that our government went so far as to create a Secretariat of Citizen Participation to implement our national prevention strategy, the Safe El Salvador plan, and play an important role in the construction of the national system.

EFUS