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GUATEMALA/US:
The Brotherhood
of the Traveling Powder
Frank
Smyth*
WASHINGTON, (IPS) - The alert to
the U.S. Border Patrol went out
across the state of Texas this
past July -- about 30 suspects
who were once part of an elite
unit of the Guatemalan special
forces were training drug
traffickers in paramilitary
tactics just over the border
from McAllen.
The unit, called the Kaibiles
after the Mayan prince Kaibil
Balam, is one of the most
fearsome military forces in
Latin America, blamed for many
of the massacres that occurred
in Guatemala during its 36-year
civil war.
By September, Mexican
authorities announced that they
had arrested seven Guatemalan
Kaibiles, including four
"deserters" who were still
listed by the Guatemalan Army as
being on active duty.
Mexican authorities say the
Kaibiles were meant to augment
Las Zetas, a drug gang of
soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn
from Mexico's own special
forces. It's logical that the
Zetas would turn to their
Guatemalan counterparts.
In addition to being a neighbour,
"Guatemala is the preferred
transit point in Central America
for onward shipment of cocaine
to the United States", the State
Department has consistently
reported to Congress since 1999.
In early November, anti-drug
authorities at the U.S. Embassy
in Guatemala told the Associated
Press that 75 percent of the
cocaine that reaches U.S. soil
passes through the Central
American nation.
More importantly, perhaps, the
dominant institution in the
country -- the military -- is
linked to this illicit trade.
Over the past two decades, the
U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) has quietly
accused Guatemalan military
officers of all ranks in every
branch of service of trafficking
drugs to the United States,
according to government
documents obtained by The Texas
Observer newspaper.
The George W. Bush
administration recently alleged
that two retired Guatemalan Army
generals, at the top of the
country's military hierarchy,
are involved in drug trafficking
and has revoked their U.S. visas
based on these allegations.
The retired generals, Manuel
Antonio Callejas y Callejas and
Francisco Ortega Menaldo, are
Guatemala's former top two
intelligence chiefs. They are
also among the founders of an
elite, shadowy club within
Guatemala's intelligence command
that calls itself "la cofradía"
or "the brotherhood", according
to U.S. intelligence reports.
The U.S. reports, recently
declassified, credit la cofradía
with "engineering" tactics that
roundly defeated Guatemala's
Marxist guerrillas. A U.N. Truth
Commission later found the same
tactics included "acts of
genocide" for driving out or
massacring the populations of no
less than 440 Mayan villages.
Since then, the same
intelligence commands have
turned their clandestine
structures to organised crimes,
according to Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) and other
U.S. intelligence reports, from
importing stolen U.S. cars to
running drugs to the United
States. Yet not one officer has
ever been prosecuted for any
international crime in either
Guatemala or the United States.
Guatemala is hardly the first
military tainted by drugs;
senior intelligence and law
enforcement officers in many
Latin American nations have been
found colluding with organised
crime. But what distinguishes
Guatemala from most other
nations is that some of its
military suspects are accused
not only of protecting large
criminal syndicates but of being
the ringleaders behind them.
The impunity that shields
Guatemalan military officers
from justice for criminal
offences started during the Cold
War. "There is a long history of
impunity in Guatemala," noted
Congressman William Delahunt, a
Democrat from Massachusetts, who
is also a member of the Western
Hemisphere Subcommittee.
"The United States has
contributed to it in a very
unsavory way dating back to
1954, and also in the 1980s," he
added, referring to a Central
Intelligence Agency-backed coup
d'état in 1954, which overturned
a democratically elected
president and brought the
Guatemalan military to power,
and to the Reagan
administration's covert backing
of the Guatemalan military at a
time when bloodshed against
Guatemalan civilians was
peaking.
Some Guatemalan officers called
their approach at the time the
practice of "draining the sea to
kill the fish", or of attacking
civilians suspected of
supporting leftist guerrillas
instead of the armed combatants
themselves.
Forensic teams have since
exhumed many mass graves. Some
unearthed women and infants.
More than 200,000 people were
killed in Guatemala in what
stands as Central America's
bloodiest conflict during the
Cold War.
The violence left the military
firmly in control of Guatemala,
and it did not take long for
this stability to catch the
attention of Colombian drug
syndicates.
"They chose Guatemala because it
is near Mexico, which is an
obvious entrance point to the
U.S., and because the Mexicans
have a long-established mafia,"
explained one Andean law
enforcement expert. "It is also
a better transit and storage
country than El Salvador because
it offers more stability and was
easier to control."
DEA special agents began
detecting Guatemalan military
officers running drugs as early
as 1986, according to DEA
documents obtained through the
U.S. Freedom of Information Act.
That's when Ortega Menaldo took
over from Callejas y Callejas as
Guatemala's military
intelligence chief. Over the
next nine years, according to
the same U.S. documents, DEA
special agents detected no less
than 31 active duty officers
running drugs.
"All roads lead to Ortega," a
U.S. drug enforcement expert
said recently. "Even current
active-duty officers may have
other ties with retired
officers. They have a mentor
relationship."
In 2002, the Bush administration
was pressured into taking
limited action to penalise top
Guatemalan military officials
thought to be involved in drug
trafficking, including revoking
Ortega Menaldo's visa.
By then, he had already denied
the U.S. drug charges, while
reminding reporters in Guatemala
City that he had previously
collaborated with both the CIA
and the DEA dating back to the
1980s.
The CIA, through spokesman Mark
Mansfield, declined all comment
for this article.
Eight months after revoking
Ortega Menaldo's visa, the Bush
administration again cited
suspected drug trafficking to
revoke the U.S. entry visa of
another Guatemalan intelligence
chief, Ret. Gen. Callejas y
Callejas.
However, rather than confront
the impunity that allows
Guatemalan military officers to
traffic drugs, many of the
country's elected officials seem
to be going in the opposite
direction.
Not long after the Bush
administration named the two
retired cofradía intelligence
chiefs as suspected drug
traffickers, members of the
Guatemalan Republican Front, or
FRG party, which was founded by
another retired army general,
introduced legislation in the
Guatemalan Congress that would
remove civilian oversight over
the military in criminal justice
matters.
"This would be a new mechanism
of impunity," noted José Zeitune
of the Geneva-based
International Commission of
Jurists and author of a 2005
report on the Guatemalan
judiciary.
The FRG was founded by Ret. Gen.
Efrain Ríos Montt. A
controversial figure, he
launched a coup d'etat in 1982
to become president of Guatemala
just as the intelligence
officers of la cofradía were
rising.
The current vice-chairman of the
Western Hemisphere subcommittee
is Jerry Weller III, a
Republican from Illinois. He
recently married Zury Ríos Sosa,
who is Ret. Gen. Montt's
daughter. Unlike other members
of the Subcommittee, Weller,
through his spokesman, Telly
Lovelace, declined all comment
for this article.
Congressman Weller's
father-in-law groomed
Guatemala's last president, an
FRG member named Alfonso
Portillo, who fled the country
in 2004 to escape his own arrest
for alleged money laundering,
according to a State Department
report.
Today, the shadowy structures of
Guatemala's intelligence
commands are so embedded with
organised crime that the Bush
administration, for one, is
already calling in the United
Nations. Putting aside its usual
criticisms of the international
body, the administration
supports a proposal to form a
U.N.-led task force explicitly
called the "Commission for the
Investigation of Illegal Armed
Groups and Clandestine Security
Apparatus" in Guatemala.
So far the only nation to yield
its sovereignty to allow the
United Nations a similar role is
Lebanon, where U.N.
investigators are digging into
the murder of a former prime
minister.
The proposed U.N. plan for
Guatemala also enjoys the
support of its new president,
Oscar Berger, a wealthy
landowner and lawyer who is well
respected by the U.S.
administration. But the idea is
encountering resistance from FRG
politicians like Weller's wife,
Ríos Sosa, who is also an FRG
congresswoman.
*Frank Smyth is a freelance
journalist who has been writing
about Guatemalan drug
trafficking since 1991. He is a
contributor to "Crimes of War:
What the Public Should Know".
His clips are posted at
www.franksmyth.com. A longer
version of this article appeared
in the Texas Observer newspaper
on Nov. 17. |
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