GUATEMALA: Impunity, Corruption Drive Wave
of Kidnappings
By
Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY (IPS) - Byron Ranulfo
Rustrián was just 12 years old. He loved
playing football and was a good student. On
Jul. 23, a group of youngsters he didn't
know invited him to play a match and he
agreed, but it was a trap: he was kidnapped
and his body turned up five days later.
His family made two ransom payments totaling
15,000 dollars. But it didn't secure his
release. Byron's body was found on Jul. 28
in a suitcase. He had apparently been
strangled.
A total of 109 kidnapping cases were
reported to the security forces in Guatemala
in the first six months of the year, while
seven people have died in the ransom
negotiations, according to the police.
People of all ages, businessmen, and even
government officials fall victim to
kidnapping in this Central American country,
which has one of the highest homicide rates
in Latin America and the world (an average
of 16 murders a day in a country of 13
million).
"There is a climate of tension and tight
secrecy surrounding this. In fact, we wanted
to do a field study, but we decided to wait
because people were distrustful and
reluctant to provide information," Carlos
Martínez, assistant ombudsman in the
southern province of Escuintla, the
country's second-most violent province,
where Rustrián was killed, told IPS.
There are other, equally disturbing,
phenomena: clandestine groups that take
justice into their own hands. "We received a
note that is going around, which accuses
several individuals of being engaged in
kidnapping, blackmail and other criminal
activity, and urges people to 'disappear'
them," said Martínez.
The extremely high level of impunity - an
estimated 98 percent of crimes committed in
Guatemala go unsolved - drives the
phenomenon, he said.
The Rustrián case shows that kidnappings are
no longer limited to the capital but have
expanded to the rest of the country, where
the police presence is even weaker.
In this country of 13 million people, there
are only 20,000 police officers, 60 percent
of whom work in the central province of
Guatemala.
"They kidnapped me and held me for a day and
a half. They stole my car and hit me over
the head," Congressman Efraín Asij told IPS.
"They took my documents and went to an
automated teller machine to steal my money.
When they looked at my identification and
saw I was a legislator, they got scared, and
I managed to escape," said Asij, of the
rightwing opposition Patriotic Party (PP),
who was kidnapped in February while driving
his car in the capital.
But his position as a lawmaker has made no
difference in terms of securing an effective
investigation. Nearly six months have gone
by and the police and the prosecutor's
office have made no arrests. "There is no
reason to believe in justice here," he said.
According to Asij, the government "has no
visible plan to combat the lack of security"
and "does not have the political will to do
so. If it did, it would purge the police and
get to work on it, because it is a state
obligation to guarantee public safety."
President Álvaro Colom, the first
left-leaning president in more than 50
years, took over in January 2008 from Óscar
Berger of the PP.
The social democratic Colom administration
has in fact sacked more than 800 police
officers for corruption.
The latest police corruption scandal broke
on Aug. 7, when four top police officials
were fired and charges were brought against
them in connection with the disappearance of
more than 100 kgs of cocaine.
Michelle De Leal, the head of Madres
Angustiadas (Anguished Mothers), a group
that emerged in 1995 in reaction to the
growing wave of kidnappings, agrees that
they are flourishing thanks to impunity.
"Impunity is factor number one, two, three,
four, five, six and seven in the phenomenon
of kidnapping," she told IPS.
"Since the criminal knows he's not going to
be caught, he keeps committing crimes," she
said. "Until there is justice, the situation
will not change."
Analysts also point to the high poverty rate
in the country - just over 50 percent
according to official statistics, although
NGOs put it much higher.
Besides kidnappings, this impoverished
Central American country has one of the
highest murder rates in the world: 47 per
100,000 population in 2007, according to the
2008 UNDP Statistical Report on Violence in
Guatemala.
The high levels of violent crime and the
continued existence of death squads that
carry out "social cleansing", often
targeting suspected youth gang members, are
seen by many analysts as holdovers from the
1960-1996 civil war in which 200,000 mainly
rural indigenous people were killed, the
great majority by the security forces and
allied paramilitary groups.
Besides impunity, De Leal also said
corruption is a factor. "The kidnapping rate
is on the rise, but many cases actually go
unreported because people know there is
corruption in the police, the prosecutor's
office and the judiciary," she said.
Rafael González, the father of 19-year-old
murder victim Rosmery González, recently
remarked to IPS that all law enforcement
authorities and agents "are on the take." He
was pointing out that when his daughter was
killed a year ago, neither the home nor the
office of the chief suspect – finally
arrested this month – were searched.
Corruption is such a widespread problem in
Guatemala that a United Nations-sponsored
International Commission against Impunity in
Guatemala (CICIG) was created.
The main task of CICIG, which began to
operate in January 2008, is restoring trust
in institutions like the corruption-riddled
police and justice system. One of the key
steps is to assist the Guatemalan public
prosecutors' office, the Supreme Court and
the police in identifying the existence of
illegal, clandestine armed security groups
and their possible links to the state
apparatus, in order to dismantle them.
The head of CICIG, Spanish prosecutor Carlos
Castresana – who was appointed by U.N.
Secretary General Ban-ki Moon – has stated
that "the justice system has been invaded by
criminal structures that keep it from
working properly. Guatemala’s institutions
must be purged from the inside; they need an
exorcism."
The director of the Guatemalan Institute of
Comparative Studies in Penal Sciences (ICCPG),
Luis Ramírez, said the rise in kidnappings
has to do with a lack of effective
investigation and intelligence work in the
criminal justice system.
"When kidnappings are so widespread, real
intelligence work is needed to determine the
logic of how they are carried out," he told
IPS. Besides, "we do not have a criminal
investigation police force. There should be
a unit of investigators independent of the
police, which answers to the president's
office."
Chilean Ambassador Jorge Saavedra said that
in Guatemala, "investigations are not
conducted, there are neither detectives nor
investigators," and "the problem is much
more than urgent."
For several years, Chile has been working
with the authorities in Guatemala to help
train police. ( |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
