Update on Drug Violence in Peten

Just thought I'd add a quick update on the last post. Guatemalan papers reported today that white sheets with messages written on them were found hanging in Quetzaltenango and Baja Verapaz signed by the Zeta cartel. The messages read:

La guerra no es contra la población civil, ni con el Gobierno, mucho menos con la prensa, así que llévenla tranquila, es contra aquellas personas que trabajan con el Golfo y la contra. Otto Salguero es uno de los más importantes surtidores de cocaína del Golfo y los que pagaron sus vidas son trabajadores que le mantienen su organización. Prensa bájenle tanta mamada antes de que la guerra sea contra ustedes, el que avisa no es traidor. Atte. Z. 200

In English:

The war is not against the civilian population, nor against the Government, even less against the press, so stay calm, the war is against those people that work for the Gulf Cartel and the other. Otto Salguero* is one of the most important cocaine suppliers for the Gulf Cartel and those that paid with their lives are workers who maintain his organization. News media, stop making such a fuss** before the war starts to be against you, you've been warned***. Attn: Z 200

The police caught three suspected Zetas as they were hanging one of these sheets.

From what I understand, there is a long history of the drug cartels intimidating journalists in Guatemala, particularly in the northern departments. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things don't start to get even more out of hand.


*Otto Salguero is the owner of the ranch where the massacre took place.

**Not quite an exact translation, but you get the picture..."bajenle tanta mamada" is a phrase I'm not very familiar with. Literally translated it means something like "don't give so many blowjobs."

***This literally translates to "he who warns is not a traitor," but is better understood as a common saying that comes out in English something like "Forewarned is forearmed" or "Don't say I didn't warn you" or, as I've translated it here, simply "you've been warned."

Drug Violence in Guatemala

I'm not sure how many of you all who read this follow the news about Central America, so I thought I would share this news story with you. I'm a little behind the times on it, but I'll plead typing exhaustion due to a combination of dissertation writing and research assisting.

So here's what's going on. Last Sunday, May 15, 27 bodies were found decapitated on a ranch in the northern Guatemalan department of Peten.  The LA Times article about the massacre does a good job of covering the situation, and I recommend taking a look. It's one of the few articles I've found in English. The article says that witnesses report around 200 armed men arriving in buses at the ranch. Official estimates place the number around 40. The perpetrators wrote warnings to the owner of the ranch in blood on the walls of one building, threatening that they were coming after him next. From what I can gather, the victims were temporary ranch workers who had been recently hired. The sole survivor of the massacre, a woman who worked at the ranch, reported that the perpetrators told her that they were Mexican, that they did not like Guatemalans and that they were killing people because the worked at the ranch. Most reports suggest that the culprits are members of the Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel that has been moving into Guatemala over the last few years. I've written about the Zetas in Guatemala in a previous post. At the time the LA Times article was written, commentators were speculating that the murders were linked to the assassination of the brother of a suspected drug trafficker committed two days earlier. The ranch owner's drug-trafficking brother had been killed in 2008, allegedly by the Zetas.

In response to the massacre, Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom declared a state of siege in the department of Peten. This BBC report (in Spanish) describes how this is not the first notable action by the Zetas in Peten in the last year--in October of 2010, ten vehicles loaded with armed men on their way to pick up a cocaine shipment got caught up in a shoot-out with police on a ranch near the Mexican border. President Colom had declared a state of siege in the department of Alta Verapaz in December because of drug violence there.

As this Siglo 21 article reports (again, in Spanish), Guatemalan police and military personnel pursued three suspected Zetas in an operation that ended in a gunfight that left two suspects dead. The article stresses that the suspects have not yet been linked to the May 14th massacre, and I haven't looked for an update on this yet. Interestingly, the article also notes that the police have begun to investigate the owner of the ranch, on the assumption that since he is being targeted by the Zetas, he must be involved in drug trafficking. According to this source, the woman who survived was spared because she was pregnant.

An article from a Mexican newspaper links the massacre to an ex-Sergeant Major in the Guatemalan Army, citing a radio interview with Colom. In the interview, Colom draws a parallel between the May 14th massacre and massacres committed during the civil war. The one survivor of the gunfight between the police/army and the suspected Zetas was a member of the Guatemalan armed forces during the war. Apparently, many of the former members of death squads joined the Zetas after the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords.

This massacre has, of course, thrown things into an uproar, especially because this is an election year. I read an abridged transcript of a radio debate between the top two candidates for the presidency, and they dug into each other over public security issues. Sandra Torres, the UNE candidate who is married to the current president (but who is filing for divorce so she can legally run for president) called Oscar Pérez, the PP candidate, a coward, partially because he shrunk the size of the military while he was Security Commissioner during the Berger administration (a reduction of the military was part of the Peace Accords). Torres basically accuses him of creating the drug trafficking routes throughout the country by decommissioning military bases. Pérez, in return, accuses Torres of being responsible for the massacre because of her role in the Colom presidency. He flat out says that Torres has been "co-governing" the country and that she's the one that tells the president what to do. Therefore, she is responsible. Sounds like a rather brutal debate to me, and one that will probably be repeated as the September elections draw closer.

I'm sharing this all with you for a few reasons. First, I find it concerning that the drug violence so publicly committed in Mexico is again becoming visible in Guatemala. Drug violence has been around for some time, but with the exception of the decapitated heads found in Guatemala City last year (one was even found on the steps of the Congress building), this type of massacre hasn't been seen since the civil war ended. I wonder what it means if the dark forces that have stayed (somewhat) below the radar for the last decade or so are coming back out into the light again. Second, it's been interesting reading the reader's comments on the news articles posted online. Quite a few of them revolve around whether the readers thought the media coverage of the massacre was too sensational, a topic that I am obviously interested in. I wonder how this type of incident affects people's feelings of safety. This was an atrocity committed in a remote place, remote at least to those living in the capital city. It could be that people will not pay too much attention once some time has passed, given that this was something that happened so far away. Gang attacks on buses are a more pressing problem for those who have to take a city bus to work. But, on the other hand, the victims were innocent laborers, people who had done nothing wrong. These were not drug dealers taking out other drug dealers. Finally, I wonder if this will affect the election. About six months before the 2007 presidential elections, a number of Salvador politicians were murdered by Guatemalan policemen, and, in turn, the policemen who were captured were murdered in a prison riot, allegedly by members of a death squad. These incidents, unsurprisingly, led to a huge scandal. But the scandal did not have much political impact (from what I can tell) in terms of having an effect on the election. Will this most recent scandal push people to vote for heavy-handed policing and the promise of a stronger military presence in public security? Or will it be forgotten four months from now?