Barbara Schieber, editor of the Guatemala Times, sent me the following editorial that she authored for that publication. Given its description of the value of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) from a Guatemalan perspective, I thought it was worth re-printing it here on my blog. I do so with the permission of Barbara and the Guatemala Times. MD
Why we defend CICIG
(Read the original article here)
Reading our most frequent critical messages from readers, we are surprised to see that most people interpret that recognizing the work of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) is equal to defending and supporting the government of Álvaro Colom. For some critics of CICIG, CICIG is the same as the current government, for these critics, there seems to be no distinction between the two institutions. That is not only ridiculous, it is also very scary. It denotes a severe degree of ignorance or an intentional disinformation strategy.
The most hate mail we receive is related to our reporting on CICIG. The readers who write to us are convinced that we must be a government owned news site because we are not attacking CICIG. We want to inform that we are one of the few news sources in Guatemala that does not have any government advertising, nor do we receive funding from any other institution. We are independent.
Having cleared up this misconception we have the following opinion about CICIG:
We applaud, support and believe in CICIG´s work, both under Carlos Castresana and under the new commissioner Francisco Dall´Anese.
CICIG is the only hope for justice that Guatemala has had and will have for the future. Is CICIG 100% perfect? No. But there is nothing 100% perfect in Guatemala or in the world. And for anyone to pretend that an institution has to be 100% perfect in order to be useful and constructive is plain idiocy.
The concept of justice managed by Guatemalans who benefits from an ineffective justice system is self-serving: They only want justice tailored to their benefit. And that is not justice, that is prostitution of justice.
Well, that is what we had before CICIG came to Guatemala, Justice was a prostitute, and it still is in many instances.
In ex-president Alfonso Portillo's case, his friends, allies, ex-members of his government and business associates were attacking CICIG and they keep at it.
In ex- minister Carlos Vielman's case, his friends, allies, business associates, and ex-members of the Berger government are attacking CICIG and they will not stop. The best example is ex-vice president Eduardo Stein, who was an active promoter and supporter of CICIG until it touched some of his friends and ex-members of the government he was part of.
In the Rosenberg case, where CICIG actually saved Guatemala’s democracy, the anti government sectors attacked CICIG because the findings of CICIG prevented President Colom from going down.
Critics of CICIG are people who consider themselves to be from the right wing, from the left wing and whatever else they call themselves (including the dark forces).
By logical deduction, the sectors that have the most to lose by a functional, independent justice system are by default the sectors who want to destroy CICIG. That includes all the sectors that now make more money and have more power - be it economic or political - because justice has not reached them (yet). The current government of President Álvaro Colom has to be included in the list of sectors that are actively obstructing CICIG´s work.
By the way, resistance to functioning judicial systems is not just a Guatemalan phenomenon, or a Guatemalan problem. What makes Guatemala somewhat different is that there are always several Guatemalas, never a nation.
The best example I can give of another very notorious place where the enforcement and strengthening of “Lady Justice”” is very unpopular, is on Wall Street.
Guess why?
Showing posts with label Alfonso Portillo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alfonso Portillo. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Friday, November 12, 2010
Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption
Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption
While Mexico's war on drugs cartels makes headlines, its bloody consequences for its southern neighbour are all but overlooked
o Michael Deibert
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 November 2010 13.30 GMT
(Read the original article here)
Fourteen years after Guatemala's government signed a peace agreement with a coalition of guerrilla groups ending a 30-year civil war, the country finds itself once again in the grip of armed conflict, though one in which the battle lines are even murkier than before. While drug-related violence plaguing the border regions of Mexico has achieved a kind of grisly global renown in recent years, the even deadlier battle directly to the south has generated little comment on the international stage.
Central America's most populous country, Guatemala has become the scene of a brutal power struggle involving Mexican cartels who have been pushed south by President Felipe Calderón's militarised campaign against drug traffickers there, and Guatemala's indigenous criminal groups, many of whom have their roots in a military intelligence apparatus set up with US aid during the country's internal armed conflict.
After the peace accords, many Guatemalans hoped that their country was embarking on a brighter future. The preceding conflict had claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly poor, indigenous campesinos caught in the struggle between a militarily-weak leftist insurgency and the ruthless scorched-earth tactics of a national army, whose only military manoeuvre appeared to be the massacre.
But now, nearly 15 years later, more people die in Guatemala every year than did at the height of the civil war. While Mexico's homicide rate has been estimated at 26 per 100,000 by the Latin American academic body Flacso Guatemala's numbers a staggering 53 per 100,000.
What went so wrong? How did the promise of peace become transmuted into the rule of Guatemala by criminal monarchies whose brazen shootouts have become a fact of daily life?
Following the peace accords, President Álvaro Arzú of the Partido de Avanzada Nacional and his successor, Alfonso Portillo of the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over some of the country's worst human rights abuses), implemented many key provisions of the peace accords half-heartedly, if at all. A civilian intelligence office mandated to combat organised crime was not established until 2007. By then, Guatemala's clandestine criminal networks had spent a decade successfully inserting themselves into virtually every manifestation of the state. The national police force remains ineffectual and numerically small, currently numbering around 26,000 officers, while Guatemala's private security sector has swelled to 120,000.
Meanwhile, the driving forces behind the syndicates that solidified in Guatemala during the civil war years as the country's military elite were left to flourish more or less untouched. Indeed, during Portillo's 2000-04 tenure as president, they became virtual contractors of the state.
In recent years, the situation has grown graver still. Guatemala's 2007 electoral contest saw current President Álvaro Colom of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party join battle against Otto Pérez Molina, a former general and leader of the Partido Patriota (PP), in one of the bloodiest ballots in the nation's history. More than 50 candidates and party activists were slain.
Mexican drug cartels such as the Cartel de Sinaloa and Los Zetas have ,meanwhile, expanded their operations throughout vast swathes of the country, ranging from San Marcos along the western border with Mexico, to the northern jungles of El Petén, to the sweltering department of Zacapa in the nation's east.
One ray of hope in this very bleak landscape has been the creation in 2007 of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigation of clandestine organisations and exposing their relation to the Guatemalan state. Until June of this year, CICIG was under the direction of Carlos Castresana, a magistrate experienced at prosecuting drug-related cases in Mexico and investigating corruption in his native Spain.
Under Castresana's leadership, CICIG was, for the first time, able to force a discussion about impunity and corruption at the highest levels of Guatemala's political system into the public realm. In another first, a former president, Alfonso Portillo, was arrested and has been held in prison since January on charges of embezzling some $15m in state funds. He also faces extradition to the United States on money-laundering charges, after his trial in Guatemala concludes.
When Castresana resigned earlier this year, charging that the Colom government was undermining CICIG's work, he was replaced by Francisco Dall'Anese Ruiz, the former attorney general of Costa Rica. Dall'Anese took the reins of an investigative body facing enormous pressures, where death threats against its staff, the murder of its witnesses and rocky relations with its nominal bosses at the UN's department of political affairs have become occupational hazards.
But CICIG remains, however imperfect, the best hope that Guatemalans have in the fight against the corruption that is causing the future of their country – blessed with plentiful natural resources and an inventive, industrious population – to vanish amid the din of automatic weapons fire. It is vital that CICIG's mandate, set to expire just as new presidential elections are held next fall, should be renewed if it is to succeed in this challenging mission. Ideally, its powers would be expanded to give it the ability to subpoena and indict suspects, as well as protect the lives of those Guatemalans who chose to cooperate.
Guatemala's fragile civil society of honest officials, human rights groups and indigenous organisations desperately needs support. As the international community – and especially the United States – saw fit to pour money into the Guatemalan military machine that helped create the criminal oligarchy that now wields such power in the country, it is only just that they should now back the efforts of CICIG and honest Guatemalans in their struggle to bring this monster down.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read here.
While Mexico's war on drugs cartels makes headlines, its bloody consequences for its southern neighbour are all but overlooked
o Michael Deibert
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 12 November 2010 13.30 GMT
(Read the original article here)
Fourteen years after Guatemala's government signed a peace agreement with a coalition of guerrilla groups ending a 30-year civil war, the country finds itself once again in the grip of armed conflict, though one in which the battle lines are even murkier than before. While drug-related violence plaguing the border regions of Mexico has achieved a kind of grisly global renown in recent years, the even deadlier battle directly to the south has generated little comment on the international stage.
Central America's most populous country, Guatemala has become the scene of a brutal power struggle involving Mexican cartels who have been pushed south by President Felipe Calderón's militarised campaign against drug traffickers there, and Guatemala's indigenous criminal groups, many of whom have their roots in a military intelligence apparatus set up with US aid during the country's internal armed conflict.
After the peace accords, many Guatemalans hoped that their country was embarking on a brighter future. The preceding conflict had claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly poor, indigenous campesinos caught in the struggle between a militarily-weak leftist insurgency and the ruthless scorched-earth tactics of a national army, whose only military manoeuvre appeared to be the massacre.
But now, nearly 15 years later, more people die in Guatemala every year than did at the height of the civil war. While Mexico's homicide rate has been estimated at 26 per 100,000 by the Latin American academic body Flacso Guatemala's numbers a staggering 53 per 100,000.
What went so wrong? How did the promise of peace become transmuted into the rule of Guatemala by criminal monarchies whose brazen shootouts have become a fact of daily life?
Following the peace accords, President Álvaro Arzú of the Partido de Avanzada Nacional and his successor, Alfonso Portillo of the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who presided over some of the country's worst human rights abuses), implemented many key provisions of the peace accords half-heartedly, if at all. A civilian intelligence office mandated to combat organised crime was not established until 2007. By then, Guatemala's clandestine criminal networks had spent a decade successfully inserting themselves into virtually every manifestation of the state. The national police force remains ineffectual and numerically small, currently numbering around 26,000 officers, while Guatemala's private security sector has swelled to 120,000.
Meanwhile, the driving forces behind the syndicates that solidified in Guatemala during the civil war years as the country's military elite were left to flourish more or less untouched. Indeed, during Portillo's 2000-04 tenure as president, they became virtual contractors of the state.
In recent years, the situation has grown graver still. Guatemala's 2007 electoral contest saw current President Álvaro Colom of the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party join battle against Otto Pérez Molina, a former general and leader of the Partido Patriota (PP), in one of the bloodiest ballots in the nation's history. More than 50 candidates and party activists were slain.
Mexican drug cartels such as the Cartel de Sinaloa and Los Zetas have ,meanwhile, expanded their operations throughout vast swathes of the country, ranging from San Marcos along the western border with Mexico, to the northern jungles of El Petén, to the sweltering department of Zacapa in the nation's east.
One ray of hope in this very bleak landscape has been the creation in 2007 of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigation of clandestine organisations and exposing their relation to the Guatemalan state. Until June of this year, CICIG was under the direction of Carlos Castresana, a magistrate experienced at prosecuting drug-related cases in Mexico and investigating corruption in his native Spain.
Under Castresana's leadership, CICIG was, for the first time, able to force a discussion about impunity and corruption at the highest levels of Guatemala's political system into the public realm. In another first, a former president, Alfonso Portillo, was arrested and has been held in prison since January on charges of embezzling some $15m in state funds. He also faces extradition to the United States on money-laundering charges, after his trial in Guatemala concludes.
When Castresana resigned earlier this year, charging that the Colom government was undermining CICIG's work, he was replaced by Francisco Dall'Anese Ruiz, the former attorney general of Costa Rica. Dall'Anese took the reins of an investigative body facing enormous pressures, where death threats against its staff, the murder of its witnesses and rocky relations with its nominal bosses at the UN's department of political affairs have become occupational hazards.
But CICIG remains, however imperfect, the best hope that Guatemalans have in the fight against the corruption that is causing the future of their country – blessed with plentiful natural resources and an inventive, industrious population – to vanish amid the din of automatic weapons fire. It is vital that CICIG's mandate, set to expire just as new presidential elections are held next fall, should be renewed if it is to succeed in this challenging mission. Ideally, its powers would be expanded to give it the ability to subpoena and indict suspects, as well as protect the lives of those Guatemalans who chose to cooperate.
Guatemala's fragile civil society of honest officials, human rights groups and indigenous organisations desperately needs support. As the international community – and especially the United States – saw fit to pour money into the Guatemalan military machine that helped create the criminal oligarchy that now wields such power in the country, it is only just that they should now back the efforts of CICIG and honest Guatemalans in their struggle to bring this monster down.
Michael Deibert is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University and the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti. His blog can be read here.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Final Testament of Rodrigo Rosenberg
(This article originally appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal)
“Good afternoon,” the video begins, featuring a man in a drab suit directly addressing the camera. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, and unfortunately, if you are watching the message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom.”
So begins the final testimony of Guatemalan attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was shot and killed on Sunday in the country’s capital, Guatemala City.
In the video, which was recorded only days before his slaying, Rosenberg goes on to accuse not only the Guatemalan president of complicity in his yet-to-come demise, but also the president’s wife, Sandra Colom; the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos; and a businessman, Gregorio Valdez.
Rosenberg, a respected lawyer, states in the video that he will be killed because of his professional work on behalf of Guatemalan businessman Khalil Musa and his daughter, Marjorie Musa, both of whom were gunned down in Guatemala in March.
Rosenberg states that the elder Musa was unaware, when named by Colom to the board of directors of Guatemala’s Banco de Desarrollo Rural S.A. (Rural Development Bank, popularly known as Banrural), that the body was being used as a center for the laundering of drug profits, the deviation of public funds, the siphoning off of state coffers on behalf of the president’s wife, and other nefarious activities.
Banrural, Rosenberg charges, is a “den of robbers, drug traffickers, and murderers,” and then lays the deaths of the Musas at the feet of the Colom administration, as well.
In a country where political corruption scandals are unfortunately all too common, the Rosenberg murder and subsequent video have sent seismic tremors through the country’s political establishment.
Colom, the head of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) who was elected president in 2007 after one of the bloodiest ballots in Guatemala’s history, addressed the nation this week, saying that the accusations on the videotape were ”totally false” and that “my conscience is clear.”
Though in no place to comment on the veracity of Rosenberg’s allegations, having followed Guatemala’s political history for a number of years, and having reported from the country off and on since 2003 (most recently for the winter 2008/09 issue of World Policy Journal), it unfortunately seemed to me only a matter of time before the violent machinations that often go on in obscurity in Central America’s most populous country burst onto the headlines in such a spectacular fashion.
While the United States government pours $450 million into Mexico via its Merida Initiative, an anti-drug trafficking program, the rest of the Central America (including Guatemala) is allotted only $100 million during fiscal year 2009. More than that, Guatemala’s current agony, though of a diverse and disparate nature, has its roots in U.S. policy in the region for much of the last 40 years.
During Guatemala’s 1960-96 civil war, successive governments battled to defeat a leftist insurgency, often with the most brutal of methods and often with the complicity of the United States, which aided a series of military dictators in setting up a sophisticated intelligence-gathering and surveillance capability throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. The war would eventually claim an estimated 200,000 lives.
Through skills learned from counterinsurgency campaigns, and particularly during the regimes of dictators General Romeo Lucas García (1978–82) and his successor General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), elements of Guatemala’s military intelligence services were able to create complex criminal networks that exist more or less intact to this day. Often referred to as the grupos clandestinos, or hidden powers, these groups engage in activities such as skimming customs duties, illicitly acquiring government contracts, human trafficking, and drug trafficking.
Following the formal end of the civil war, Guatemala’s already fragile state was further weakened after Ríos Montt formed the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG) party in 1989. The FRG’s candidate, Alfonso Portillo, won presidential elections in the country a decade later. As the FRG successfully melded militarism with a virulent hatred of Guatemala’s traditional economic elite, during the Portillo years the grupos clandestinos became virtual contractors of the state. Their links with Guatemala’s various political parties of the left and the right continue to in the present era.
Two of the biggest crime syndicates in the country, La Cofradía (The Brotherhood) and El Sindicato (The Syndicate), are both made up of current and former military officers, according to Guatemalan and U.S. government officials.
La Cofradía is said to be chiefly directed by two former generals, Manuel Callejas y Callejas and Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, while the dominant force in El Sindicato is alleged to be Otto Pérez Molina, a former army officer and head of the Partido Patriota. Pérez Molina came in second to Colom in the 2007 presidential ballot.
Animosity between the two groups is said to be extreme and has often spilled over into the political arena.
During a visit to Guatemala City last September, a Guatemalan government official with close links to Colom told me matter-of-factly that, in terms of the state security apparatus, “Colom’s guys are Ortega Menaldo’s guys. He needed them as protection against Pérez Molina.”
As is the case in other nascent democracies in the region, such as Haiti, drug-related corruption and organized crime in Guatemala know no political ideology. As is the case in Haiti, an unarmed civil society is standing up to powerful criminal interests, an entrenched oligarchy, and populist demagogues, attempting to build a decent country at great personal risk. Meanwhile, the international community is greeting wave after wave of drug and corruption-related violence with a disinterested shrug now that Guatemala is no longer part of Cold War power politics.
Towards the end of his video testimonial, Rodrigo Rosenberg faces the camera and laments Guatemala’s present as the “worst period” in the country’s history. He then goes on to issue a challenge, both to his countrymen and to the international community as a whole.
“It is our country,” Rosenberg proclaims. “It belongs to us, not to the thieves, the assassins, and the drug dealers. Guatemala is not theirs. We won’t give it to them.”
Michael Deibert is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.
“Good afternoon,” the video begins, featuring a man in a drab suit directly addressing the camera. “My name is Rodrigo Rosenberg Marzano, and unfortunately, if you are watching the message, it is because I was assassinated by President Álvaro Colom.”
So begins the final testimony of Guatemalan attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg, who was shot and killed on Sunday in the country’s capital, Guatemala City.
In the video, which was recorded only days before his slaying, Rosenberg goes on to accuse not only the Guatemalan president of complicity in his yet-to-come demise, but also the president’s wife, Sandra Colom; the president’s private secretary, Gustavo Alejos; and a businessman, Gregorio Valdez.
Rosenberg, a respected lawyer, states in the video that he will be killed because of his professional work on behalf of Guatemalan businessman Khalil Musa and his daughter, Marjorie Musa, both of whom were gunned down in Guatemala in March.
Rosenberg states that the elder Musa was unaware, when named by Colom to the board of directors of Guatemala’s Banco de Desarrollo Rural S.A. (Rural Development Bank, popularly known as Banrural), that the body was being used as a center for the laundering of drug profits, the deviation of public funds, the siphoning off of state coffers on behalf of the president’s wife, and other nefarious activities.
Banrural, Rosenberg charges, is a “den of robbers, drug traffickers, and murderers,” and then lays the deaths of the Musas at the feet of the Colom administration, as well.
In a country where political corruption scandals are unfortunately all too common, the Rosenberg murder and subsequent video have sent seismic tremors through the country’s political establishment.
Colom, the head of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) who was elected president in 2007 after one of the bloodiest ballots in Guatemala’s history, addressed the nation this week, saying that the accusations on the videotape were ”totally false” and that “my conscience is clear.”
Though in no place to comment on the veracity of Rosenberg’s allegations, having followed Guatemala’s political history for a number of years, and having reported from the country off and on since 2003 (most recently for the winter 2008/09 issue of World Policy Journal), it unfortunately seemed to me only a matter of time before the violent machinations that often go on in obscurity in Central America’s most populous country burst onto the headlines in such a spectacular fashion.
While the United States government pours $450 million into Mexico via its Merida Initiative, an anti-drug trafficking program, the rest of the Central America (including Guatemala) is allotted only $100 million during fiscal year 2009. More than that, Guatemala’s current agony, though of a diverse and disparate nature, has its roots in U.S. policy in the region for much of the last 40 years.
During Guatemala’s 1960-96 civil war, successive governments battled to defeat a leftist insurgency, often with the most brutal of methods and often with the complicity of the United States, which aided a series of military dictators in setting up a sophisticated intelligence-gathering and surveillance capability throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. The war would eventually claim an estimated 200,000 lives.
Through skills learned from counterinsurgency campaigns, and particularly during the regimes of dictators General Romeo Lucas García (1978–82) and his successor General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), elements of Guatemala’s military intelligence services were able to create complex criminal networks that exist more or less intact to this day. Often referred to as the grupos clandestinos, or hidden powers, these groups engage in activities such as skimming customs duties, illicitly acquiring government contracts, human trafficking, and drug trafficking.
Following the formal end of the civil war, Guatemala’s already fragile state was further weakened after Ríos Montt formed the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (FRG) party in 1989. The FRG’s candidate, Alfonso Portillo, won presidential elections in the country a decade later. As the FRG successfully melded militarism with a virulent hatred of Guatemala’s traditional economic elite, during the Portillo years the grupos clandestinos became virtual contractors of the state. Their links with Guatemala’s various political parties of the left and the right continue to in the present era.
Two of the biggest crime syndicates in the country, La Cofradía (The Brotherhood) and El Sindicato (The Syndicate), are both made up of current and former military officers, according to Guatemalan and U.S. government officials.
La Cofradía is said to be chiefly directed by two former generals, Manuel Callejas y Callejas and Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, while the dominant force in El Sindicato is alleged to be Otto Pérez Molina, a former army officer and head of the Partido Patriota. Pérez Molina came in second to Colom in the 2007 presidential ballot.
Animosity between the two groups is said to be extreme and has often spilled over into the political arena.
During a visit to Guatemala City last September, a Guatemalan government official with close links to Colom told me matter-of-factly that, in terms of the state security apparatus, “Colom’s guys are Ortega Menaldo’s guys. He needed them as protection against Pérez Molina.”
As is the case in other nascent democracies in the region, such as Haiti, drug-related corruption and organized crime in Guatemala know no political ideology. As is the case in Haiti, an unarmed civil society is standing up to powerful criminal interests, an entrenched oligarchy, and populist demagogues, attempting to build a decent country at great personal risk. Meanwhile, the international community is greeting wave after wave of drug and corruption-related violence with a disinterested shrug now that Guatemala is no longer part of Cold War power politics.
Towards the end of his video testimonial, Rodrigo Rosenberg faces the camera and laments Guatemala’s present as the “worst period” in the country’s history. He then goes on to issue a challenge, both to his countrymen and to the international community as a whole.
“It is our country,” Rosenberg proclaims. “It belongs to us, not to the thieves, the assassins, and the drug dealers. Guatemala is not theirs. We won’t give it to them.”
Michael Deibert is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute.
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