The journalist covering this story introduces his piece by describing a Guatemalan friend who "spoke in hushed tones"* about a forced meeting between his family and the Zetas up in the norther department of Petén. Petén is a sparsely populated department covered by jungle that borders Mexico and Belize, and is home to the ancient Mayan city of Tikal, a popular tourist attraction. This story of a wealthy family meeting with drug cartels reminds me of a story I heard while talking with a Guatemalan acquaintance about people's support for harsh policing practices proposed by one of the major political parties, the Patriot Party (Partido Patriota, PP). He told be about how is family used to live on a finca (a large ranch in the countryside) in one of the northern departments. One day he found an envelope full of cash on his doorstep addressed to him. He knew that many of his neighbors had been bullied into allowing drug traffickers to land small airplanes on their land in exchange for envelopes full of cash, and he got nervous. He decided to leave the envelope where it was, and the next day it was gone. But a few days later, another envelope appeared, with more cash. He left this one alone as well, and the pattern continued for weeks. Finally, he received a phone call threatening his wife and his children if he did not take the envelope. He told me that after that phone call, he sold his ranch and moved to the city with his family. He says that now he never lets his wife or his kids leave the house alone. They are always with him or accompanied by a bodyguard. I don't know how much of this story is true--I have no way of verifying it--but it is certainly interesting. I heard it in the summer of 2007, and the stories really haven't changed all that much. The drug cartels still have a relatively free hand (despite President Colom calling a state of siege in the department of Alta Verapaz), and corruption is rampant. To make things more complicated, it seems like at least some of the corruption is due to threats and extortion.
I wanted to point out a few other things in the Miami Herald article. First, interestingly, the writer mentions that, "Faced with such violence, a social movement to demand effective, capable law-enforcement and a transparent, non-corrupt judiciary has yet to emerge from Guatemala's fragile civil society."Which, from all that I've seen, is true. Yes, there are some (very good) NGOs and other activist groups that are focused on public security issues, impunity, police reform, etc., but there hasn't been a social movement to collect these disparate groups together. And I'm not sure (speaking as an outsider) if a cohesive, effective social movement in Guatemala is likely.
Second, the journalist writes,
In Guatemala, the cartels have found a country with a state designed to be weak and ineffective by a rapacious oligarchy. Only 15,000 soldiers and 26,000 police patrol its rugged terrain, though there are more than 100,000 active private security personnel. Scaled down after the country's 1996 peace accords following decades of atrocities, today's numerically small and poorly trained Guatemalan security forces have made way for the armed enforcers of the country's various criminal monarchies.Is this a roundabout way of blaming the current security crisis on the Peace Accords? I don't think that is the writer's intention, but the paragraph starts to read that way. The Peace Accords scaled back Guatemala's military forces, true. And yes, there are many more private security forces than public security forces (a problem that is, of course, not unique to Guatemala). But is more soldiers on the streets the solution to the drug trafficking problem? The article does not mention, for example, that corruption also pervades the military and the police. But he is right in that they are poorly equipped. I remember reading a newspaper article last year about a request from the National Civil Police to be able to arm themselves with guns confiscated from drug traffickers. We also have to remember, too, that although soldiers are patrolling the streets and fighting drug traffickers, the armed forces are not the same as the police.
Update: there is also an article covering this issue at the Economist that covers not only Guatemala, but also El Salvador and Honduras. There's an interesting map that give homicide rates of each of the Central American countries. Despite the difficulties of using national homicide statistics, given different definitions of homicide (does it include traffic deaths?) and different collection techniques (and the possibility of outright lying), it is still shocking to see the difference between the "northern triangle" countries and the rest of Central America.
*Deibert, Michael. "Caught in the Crossfire." Miami Herald. January 18, 2011.
No comments:
Post a Comment