Profile : An Uphill Fight for Law and Order in El Salvador : Young chief is building civilian police force with scant resources. Some from both right and left have tried to thwart efforts.

Rodrigo Avila, the head of El Salvador’s new civilian police department, arrives for a meeting alone and driving his own car. No bodyguards, no assistants. This might not seem unusual except that Avila has survived three assassination attempts in his first six months on the job.

“I see it as a matter of fate,” the young commander says, shrugging off the peril. “It is more dangerous today in El Salvador to be a run-of-the-mill Salvadoran than to be the police chief.”

An engineer by training, a businessman by profession and a skilled sharpshooter by avocation, Avila heads the institution that is perhaps most crucial to maintaining peace in a country emerging from 12 years of civil war.

The National Civilian Police--a nonpolitical, professional law enforcement agency--was created as part of U.N.-brokered accords that ended the war in 1992. It is intended to replace the loyal police forces that right-wing Salvadoran regimes had used for years to suppress political opposition and that were blamed for widespread atrocities.

But building a police department in a still-polarized country such as El Salvador, where hidden agendas can overwhelm available resources, is no easy task, and no one knows that better than the 30-year-old Avila.

“It is very hard to create a police force, one that is born out of politics, making the maximum effort that it not be politicized,” Avila said in an interview at his new headquarters, a refurbished auto-repair shop warehouse.

“I never thought this would be easy, but I never realized it would be so difficult. . . . Forming a police force, a project that can take years, decades, centuries, we had to do in one year and eight months. And in a very improvised way. We had to create a police force from zero.”

Today there are nearly 6,000 men and women wearing the new civilian police uniform and deployed throughout the country. Under the accords, the force includes former enemies--onetime leftist guerrillas and erstwhile members of state security agencies that battled throughout El Salvador’s bloody civil war of the 1980s--as well as ordinary Salvadorans.

As an institution, the police force is still very weak. El Salvador is suffering its worst crime wave ever, according to Avila, and the police are not yet capable of conducting serious investigations.

Much of the crime--murders, carjackings, home robberies--are blamed on organized crime syndicates with strong connections to the military. Fewer than 3% of police officers are assigned to investigations, and even those have yet to receive training or equipment, according to U.N. officials monitoring the peace accords that ended the open fighting in 1992. More than 80% of the people in El Salvador’s jails and prisons have yet to be tried for their alleged crimes.

Most important, the project of forming a professional police force has met with considerable resistance, especially from intransigent elements in the government.

The previous administration of President Alfredo Cristiani, which was in office until June, tried to secretly transfer units of the old, discredited police force intact into the new police agency in violation of the peace accords. The government also allowed some officers to sidestep required human rights training and avoid a screening process intended to weed out the most abusive agents.

Avila, who likes to compare himself to Don Quixote tilting at windmills, says he has had to struggle against the ulterior motives of all sides involved in the process.

“We have been fighting against a lot of resistance. People in the government who didn’t really care about the police force. For them it was just one more part of the peace accords that had to be fulfilled. People in the army who wanted to put the brakes on the project. People from the guerrillas who thought they could take power through the police force.

“These people did not recognize the importance of creating a professional police force.”

Avila speaks frankly about rampant corruption in the government, the judiciary, even the military. This is daring talk from anybody, but especially unusual coming from someone with Avila’s background.

The son of a military doctor who achieved the rank of colonel, Avila considers himself to be a product of the ideological right. He helped train army snipers during the war.

But, he says, the war is over, and El Salvador has to change. It can no longer be divided simplistically into the rich and poor, left and right.

“I am a person on the right. But I don’t discriminate. I work with people from the left. In the (National Civilian Police) no one has an ideology. This is a professional job at the service of the community. There are people who call me a Communist because I work with the (former guerrillas). It is absurd. I am more right-wing than the ones who accuse me, because they are only thinking of their personal interests.”

Avila’s office is spartan, with a desk, a large plant and a picture of his young daughter.

He casually grasps a Grip-Master hand exerciser as he speaks, and eagerly shows a visitor a couple of his department’s newest acquisitions: a hard-rubber tactical baton and a can of pepper spray.

He was educated in El Salvador and at the University of North Carolina, where he earned an engineering degree, and worked for Exxon before being named to head the operations division of the new police force last year. He was appointed chief in June.

With no police experience except for a stint as a campus security cop at North Carolina, Avila relies heavily on gumption and enthusiasm.

He is likely to show up in shirt sleeves for a meeting with judges in a country where officialdom normally clings to formalities. And he will work the streets, showing up at a demonstration to negotiate with disgruntled bus drivers, for instance.

At some point, human rights and U.N. officials say, Avila is likely to get his wings clipped if his efforts to build up the powers of the police challenge the political equation too directly.

President Armando Calderon Sol recently ordered the army into the streets of San Miguel, El Salvador’s second-largest city, to end a transport strike, declaring that Avila’s Civilian Police agency was not capable of handling it.

And already, some of the evils that plagued the old police, such as bribe-taking and other corrupt practices, are beginning to creep into the new agency, knowledgeable observers say.

“The most I can hope to do is lay the foundation, set out some rules, so that no one, not even a new police chief, can simply do whatever he wants but must follow a new, institutional policy,” Avila says. “That will be the legacy.”

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Biography

Name: Rodrigo Avila

Title: Director, National Civilian Police

Age: 30

Personal: Married to Jeanine. Has a 4-year-old daughter. Educated at University of El Salvador and University of North Carolina. Two-time national shooting champion.

Quote: “It is very hard to create a police force, one that is born out of politics, making the maximum effort that it not be politicized.”