Four days later, his body was found next to a highway outside the city. He had been bound, tortured and shot five times in the head. Perhaps because he was an employee of El Diario de Hoy, a leading newspaper, the death of this 27-year-old electrical engineer and former English teacher made headlines for a day. As of late October, however, no arrests had been made, and neither the police nor the attorney general had released any information about the case.

In the eyes of the public, the accomplishments of El Salvador’s judicial reform are constantly being eclipsed by cases like Rosales’. Eight years after the peace agreements were signed, El Salvador remains a violent place to live. Weapons abound and they are used with numbing frequency. Marginal areas around San Salvador are terrorized by armed gangs, known as maras, that control entire neighborhoods and maintain close links with criminal organizations in Los Angeles and other cities in the United States. Although the situation is believed to have improved in recent years, the government’s National Council on Public Security recorded 6,972 homicides in 1996—an average 19 per day in a country with only six million inhabitants. Yet according to the council, only 415 arrests were made in connection to those homicides, and less than one fourth of these led to convictions.

Although comparable figures are not available for the period following the implementation of El Salvador’s new criminal code, it is clear enough that improvements are coming very slowly. Critics of the judicial reform have seized on this fact, blaming the persistence of crime and impunity on the new criminal codes. The new laws are described in the media as “made in Switzerland” and totally inappropriate for El Salvador’s “tropical” social reality. They are said to tie the hands of the police by imposing too many due process guarantees. In a Gallup poll of 1,200 Salvadorans carried out between August and October of 1999, 7 out of 10 respondents said they believe the laws protect criminals more than victims.

To defenders of the reforms, these criticisms reflect a fundamental confusion about causes of crime and the role of the judicial system. “Some people believe that crime is caused by a lack of repression,” says Lorena Peña, a Legislative Assembly member. “We think it is caused by the social and economic conditions we live in. Just because we’re poor doesn’t mean we should have a judicial system from the Middle Ages.”

Francisco Rodolfo Bertrand Galindo, El Salvador’s minister of justice and public security, believes that public sentiment against the new laws is due in part to the fact that “the reform was not adequately marketed” to the public. “The reform goes beyond this issue of the law,” he says. “It has to do with judges, with prosecutors, with the police and their procedures. So when there is a failure, it can be due to any one of these things.”

Moreover, El Salvador’s new criminal code is not nearly as liberal as its critics claim. It allows so-called extrajudicial confessions (meaning that confessions made to the police, in the absence of a judge, are in some cases admissible as evidence in court), even though human rights groups report that such confessions have been associated with torture. And last September the Legislative Assembly passed amendments to the criminal code that lengthened maximum sentences across the board and extended the use of pretrial detention.

The real problem, according to many observers, is that El Salvador’s social problems simply exceed the resources of its institutions. Before they ever enter a courtroom, for example, most Salvadorans deal with the National Civil Police. Created as a result of the peace agreements, this force includes thousands of former soldiers and guerrillas.

Though enormous advances have been made in training and re-educating the police, their overall ability to investigate crimes is still very limited. The resources needed to collect and analyze evidence, find witnesses and conduct proper autopsies are often not available. The same can be said for El Salvador’s prisons: although the new laws include ambitious mandates for rehabilitating prisoners, a lack of funds is keeping most of these reforms on paper.

In the long term, the risk for El Salvador’s judicial reform is that it will generate expectations of justice that cannot be fulfilled in fact. “We are very proud of the institutional and judicial framework we’ve built,” says María Teresa de Mejía, who runs the Salvadoran Institute for the Protection of Minors. “The new laws make it possible for everyone to claim their rights. But what if we are unable to answer those claims?”

El Salvador’s current government is determined to prevent such a scenario. It has announced plans to launch a Project for the Social Prevention of Crime that will emphasize public education, youth programs, and a new concept of policing that will rely on cooperation between neighborhood groups and community-based police patrols.

For Benjamín Cuéllar, a human rights advocate, such cooperation is precisely what El Salvador needs. “The only way to keep this wheel from turning backward is to get people to trust, to participate, and to push in the same direction.”