There are two things.
One is, yes, I am. If you had asked me two years ago, I wouldn't be quite so positive. I would be wondering.
I'll use the experience we have in Guatemala as an example. From my experience in this work, you don't just add a piece and all of sudden it improves. If the crime scenes aren't working, it's not going to work. If the investigation's not working, it's not going to work. If the preparation for trial's not working, it's not going to work. It doesn't matter what stage. If one of the stages is dysfunctional, it's not going to work.
Our experience in Guatemala is that we've reached a point where it has gone from 5% three years ago to 28%. There's a certain point where I think you get to, what I call, a plateau “jump”, where the pieces start to come together.
We're not there. We're not nearly there. One of the things is that we need a multi-year approach to this, because our process is not training, it's justice development. Now, what does that mean? That means there's a training component.
Then we have an implementation strategy. For example, there are 640 prosecutors in Honduras. In the case of the work that we've been thinking of doing in southern Mexico, there are 35,000 police. In order to get functionality, we can't just train 10 people, or 20 people. We do it by regions.
For example, in the case of Tegucigalpa, we've been training all the prosecutors and the police in the one area. Then we monitor them. We have teams that go after three months, and then after six months, to observe whether they're applying the skills and whether they're working the way we are. Then we give them feedback. We did that in Guatemala. We had a team that, after we trained them, went to 100 murders.
Our process is that you have to determine the need. You have to work on the training. We do a “train the trainer” model because we have to leave their capacity installed. Once we've done the initial training, we actually use our own local trainers and we support them.
But you see, when you're dealing with these numbers, it takes years. We have to take Tegucigalpa, we have to take San Pedro, we have to take La Ceiba, and we have to build functionality in each area, step by step. Then I think you reach a critical mass where eventually what you've done has actually overwhelmed what was the old. That's the way we approach it.
It's the whole issue of monitoring and quality maintenance. Our concern is that if we train them, and six months later they say, “Oh, I'm too busy, and I won't bother doing the fingerprints, because I have another murder over here”, then the quality is gone. A quality control element also has to be built in, and we're trying to do that.