What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

Wed 5 Dec 2018 15.48 GMT

What is forcing thousands of migrants to flee their home countries?

The United States is more to blame for its immigration problem than it would like to take credit for

By Michael Deibert

The Guardian

(Read the original article here)

The mass of humanity living in a makeshift encampment at the US border with Mexico is driven by historical forces of which many Americans are only dimly aware.

Demonized by Donald Trump as an “invasion” of miscreants who should be housed in concentration camp-like tent cities, the migrants, many of whom are in fact planning on applying for asylum, persist under the weight of a US history in their home countries as heavy as any burden they carry with them.

Though several caravans have made the trek to the United States over the last year, the one that attracted Trump’s attention left San Pedro Sula, the second largest city in Honduras, on 12 October. It was largely made up of citizens of that country, as well as some from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Traversing a route infamous for its danger – the Mexican leg of the journey crosses states long in thrall to the country’s powerful drug cartels – their safety in numbers logic is self-evident. What is forcing thousands of people into such a precarious flight?

In Honduras, where the caravan originated, the past decade has seen the terrorizing effects of street violence by criminal gangs exacerbated by an increased presence of Mexican cartels, police abuses and the murder of human rights and environmental activists, most notoriously that of Berta Cáceres in 2016.

Much of this current instability can be traced back to the June 2009 ouster of its then president, the erratic leftist Manuel Zelaya. Though the then US president Barack Obama declared the ouster “not legal”, his administration subsequently worked with regional powers such as Mexico to assure Zelaya did not return to office.

After Zelaya’s overthrow, Honduras was run by a series of rightwing leaders. When the most recent of them, Juan Orlando Hernández, looked likely to lose his re-election last year to the former journalist Salvador Nasralla, his government responded with a repression that Amnesty International characterized as having “violated international norms and the right to personal integrity, liberty and fair trial guarantees”.

At least 31 people, the vast majority civilians, died in the violence, but Orlando Hernández continued in office, with Trump’s state department congratulating him on his victory while stressing “the need for a robust national dialogue”.

Honduras is hardly the only country whose society has been undermined by US political decisions both recent and historic.

In neighboring Guatemala, the US provided extensive aid to the Guatemalan military during the country’s 1960 to 1996 civil war, which killed an estimated 200,000 people. The war itself was to a large extent an outgrowth of a US-backed coup that ousted the country’s democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz, in 1954.

More recently, the Trump administration has lent its support to attempts to neutralize the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (Cicig), a United Nations-backed body tasked with investigating organized crime and its links to political actors.

One of those actors is Guatemala’s current president, former comedian Jimmy Morales, who is under investigation for allegedly accepting illicit campaign contributions, and came to power with the support of some of the most reactionary elements of the country’s military.

Under the rule of Morales, the Guatemalan government was one of only a handful that followed Trump’s decision to move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem this past May. With his undercutting of Cicig, many view Trump as returning the favour.

But perhaps no country’s history attests to the US role in helping to create the conditions for this latter-day exodus than El Salvador.

After an October 1979 coup resulted in a military-civilian junta, the US government, first under Jimmy Carter and then under Ronald Reagan, supported the junta even as its civilian members resigned and it grew more violent.

As political polarization accelerated, a bubbling multi-front guerrilla insurgency united under the umbrella of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In turn, the FMLN was met with increasing death-squad activity by the right. Much of this violence was orchestrated by US-trained Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, a former intelligence official.

The United States worked furiously to prevent a D’Aubuisson victory in 1984 elections that saw center-right José Napoleón Duarte come to power. Despite its role in preventing D’Aubuisson’s election, the US government for years poured money into Salvadoran military bodies such as the Atlacatl Battalion, whose chief military maneuver appears to have been the massacre, a tendency which it carried out in mass killings in hamlets such as El Mozote and El Calabozo and even in the capital, where it murdered six Jesuit priests and two lay workers in 1989.

Both during his campaign and his president, Trump has frequently inveighed against criminal organizations with links to El Salvador and their malign influence on the United States. Here, too, the history is more complicated – and more shaped by the US – than many acknowledge.

During El Salvador’s civil war, which lasted until 1992 and killed an estimated 75,000 Salvadorans, hundreds of thousands fled to the United States, especially to southern California. There, young Salvadoran boys found themselves endangered by local gangs and coalesced into their own groups, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13.

When some of these young gang members, not US citizens though culturally American, were deported back to El Salvador, they took California’s gang culture with them. The gangs have since proliferated throughout Central America. Though MS-13 remains the bete noire of Trump and his acolytes, the American origins of the gang go almost unreported.

All this being the case, it is rather irresponsible for the United States to take such an active role in creating the conditions that make people want to flee the countries that make up the Central American isthmus and then profess shock when they do so.

The caravans themselves push on, as the assassinated Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton once wrote, “far from where hope is already left behind”.

Notes on the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala

The Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) was formed as an outgrowth of the peace accords that ended Guatemala's 36 year civil war. It was tasked with supporting the country's Ministerio Público & Policía Nacional Civil (PNC) in their investigations of illegal security groups and clandestine security structures with direct or indirect links to the state or ability to block judicial actions related to their illegal activities.

Since its inception, CICIG has had some stunning successes, incl arrests of a sitting president (Otto Pérez Molina), a former president (Álvaro Colom) a fmr VP (Roxana Baldetti) and targeting a former president (Álvaro Arzú) and a sitting president (Jimmy Morales) for their alleged roles in corruption.

I have been reporting on Guatemala for 15 years and I have been scathingly critical in my writing of parties of both the right (Partido Patriota, Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, Frente de Convergencia Nacional) and the left (Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza) and their roles in maintaining this system that is strangling the country. To anyone who has spent any time in Guatemala, it is clear that the cancer of corruption and impunity in not an ideological struggle but a phenomenon from which all political currents benefit and seek to maintain.

As the net closes in on Guatemala's political elite - especially sitting president Jimmy Morales, his family and his supporters - troll armies, many with links to online marketing businesses based in Guatemala City, have emerged.

The politicos and their troll farms are feverishly working around the clock to muddy the waters and drum up support for the expulsion of CICIG before their backers have to face justice for their crimes. The troll army follows a particular pattern including variations of the following:

1) Claim that they are "true" or "pure" Guatemalans (the language of the genocide that marked Guatemala's 1960-1996 civil war)

2) Claim that CICIG chief Iván Velásquez is linked to Colombia's FARC or the government of Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, even though no evidence exists for this and CICIG arrested the country's first leftist president (Álvaro Colom) since Jacobo Árbenz was in office from 1951 to 1954, only to be overthrown by CIA-engineered coup.

3) The troll armies then seek to defame and slander members of Guatemala's civil society who have long battled against impunity & corruption, people like human rights activist Helen Mack Chang and  El Periódico publisher José Rubén Zamora

4)  The troll army then, usually fairly quickly, curdles into anti-semitic dog-whistles by blaming George Soros etc for the temerity of CICIG & the Ministerio Público to prosecute corrupt Guatemalan officials for their crimes.

Unfortunately, they have been so effective that some people I respect and other people of influence - Mary Anastasia O'Grady, Bill Browder, Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, New Jesery Representative, Chris Smith & others - have (with the best intentions, I think) been swept up in the desperate fight for survival of Guatemala's corrupt political actors.

A closer look at recent events in Guatemala - such as the revelation of illicit campaign financing by the FCN of president Jimmy Morales - reveals a truer picture, that those who have feasted on the prostrate body of the Guatemalan nation and state for decades feel they are fighting for their very lives.

My advice to those seeking to weigh in on role of CICIG in Guatelama would be to look at the totality of CICIG's work there over the last decade and weigh it against the forces arrayed against it & what their motivations may be. The lives of 17 million Guatemalans, and their struggle to build a decent country depend on it.

Was the ‘Guatemalan Spring’ an illusion?

Michael Deibert | 11/07/2017 5:21 pm

fDi Magazine

(Read the original article here)

A year into president Jimmy Morales’s mandate, Guatemala’s economic woes persist. Michael Deibert reports.

In the autumn of 2015, it appeared that Guatemala, Central America’s most populous nation and largest economy, might be turning a corner. Two decades after a peace accord ended Latin America’s bloodiest civil war, the nation, mired in corruption and impunity, succeeded in striking some important blows against both.

Following weeks of massive street protests, both the then-sitting president, Otto Pérez Molina, and recently-departed vice-president, Roxana Baldetti, were divested of their duties and imprisoned on corruption charges, accused of running a criminal network known as La línea (The Line) while in office. The arrests were spearhead by the work of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body that has operated since 2007, which works closely  with Guatemala’s Ministerio Público and is charged with investigating criminal organisations and exposing their relation to the state.

At the time, many heralded the developments as a kind of “Guatemalan Spring”, one that would hopefully sweep much of  the corrupt old order away and give the country a chance to capitalise on its vast natural resources and unique geographic position on the Central American isthmus.

A political outsider, former comedian Jimmy Morales, won the presidency that autumn, though the fact that he ran as the candidate of the Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN), a party founded by former military officers leaning to the extreme right of the country’s military spectrum, gave many pause.

A little over a year into his mandate – despite the fact that, last year, Guatemala attracted $1.18bn in foreign investment, with agriculture, electricity manufacturing and mining leading the way, according to figures from Santander – the suspicions some had about Mr Morales have done anything but dissipate.

This past March, thousands marched through the streets of the nation’s capital, Guatemala City, demanding his resignation after both his brother, Samuel Morales, and son, José Manuel Morales Marroquín, were arrested on charges they participated in a tax fraud scheme. The pair are currently awaiting trial.

At around the same time, in an event that seemed to highlight government indifference to Guatemala’s social ills, 41 teenage girls were burned to death at the Virgen de la Asunción shelter, which had been recommended closed due to repeated allegations of abuse of its charges. The case led to the indictment of three government officials and two police officers and prosecutors have openly talked about having Mr Morales’ immunity lifted in it, as well.

Two towns in the department of San Marcos, Ixchiguán and Tajumulco, entered a state of siege due to conflict between local and national authorities and bands of rival drug traffickers.

One small bright spot has been the renewal by the United Nations of the mandate of CICIG head Iván Velásquez this past June. Mr Velásquez, a Colombian jurist, has led the body since 2013, and has earned the enmity of many of Guatemala’s corrupt actors, even as CICIG has maintained a large degree of support among the population. 

If Guatemala is to continue to move forward and solidify the modest gains against impunity it has made, the work of CICIG and the Guatemalan institutions it partners with – and the power of its newly-motivated citizenry – will be key.

The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes

The Panama Papers is the least of Central America’s woes

By Michael Deibert

16/06/2016 

FDI
 

Corruption, resignations, drug wars: the Mossack Fonseca leak – known globally as 'the Panama Papers' – may have made headlines, but Central America has far more pressing problems to address if it is ever to regain investor confidence.

(Please read the original article here)

When 11.5 million documents were leaked from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca in April, a host of politically connected international figures – and some politicians themselves – were revealed to be hiding their assets by sometimes dubious means. The impact was particularly strong in Latin America, especially on the isthmus of Central America, where several countries have been rocked by violence and allegations of shady business practices.

In recent years, Panama itself has worked hard to shed itself of the reputation as some sort of economic 'Wild West', which it acquired in the 1980s. During the 1983 to 1989 rule of dictator Manuel Noriega, Panama became known as a hub for laundering drug money profits for groups such as the Medellín cartel, the Ochoa family and others. Mr Noriega was arrested following the 1989 US invasion of Panama and served 17 years in prison in the US on drug-trafficking charges. He was subsequently extradited to France where he was also convicted of narcotics-related offences, and is now in a Panamanian jail.

Though Panama’s economy stabilised enough for several ratings agencies to boost its sovereign debt rating to investment grade, former president Ricardo Martinelli, who served from 2009 to 2014, ended up in exile in Miami on the run from embezzlement charges back home.

Slow-moving Nicaragua

North of Panama, Nicaragua is these days is ruled as a personal fiefdom by Daniel Ortega of the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, in office since 2007 and showing no signs of leaving any time soon.

Mr Ortega’s ambitious plan to one-up Panama’s inter-oceanic canal with one across Nicaragua – which were announced with great fanfare in 2013 with an estimated cost of $50bn – have thus far come to nothing. Ostensibly the brainchild of Chinese billionaire Wang Jing, chairman and CEO of Beijing’s Xinwei telecoms company (an entity that had never before had any involvement in infrastructure projects of this magnitude), ground was broken for the canal’s construction nearly two years ago.

Today, however, amid howls of protests from environmentalists, human rights leaders and others, work on the canal is virtually non-existent, as is any explanation for when it may be continued.

El Salvador violence

In neighbouring El Salvador, a 2012 truce organised between the government of then-president Mauricio Funes and the country’s two main gangs, Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, saw murder numbers cut in half the following year. But Mr Funes’ replacement – former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén, like Funes a member a member of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front – abandoned the truce upon taking office in 2014, resulting in open warfare across the country between the gangs and the security forces.

Last year, El Salvador’s murder rate rose by a shocking 70% compared with the previous year: 6657 people died in what was by far the most deadly year since the end of the country’s civil war in 1992.

All this in a country with a population of just 6.4 million.

This year’s figures look set to surpass that, and Mr Sánchez Cerén’s government has taken the additional step of arresting some of those – including former government officials – who had negotiated the original truce. One long-time observer of the country described the government’s current policy as “madness”.

Guatemalan uncertainty

In Guatemala, Central America’s most populous country and its largest economy, three close confidants of former presidents Álvaro Colom, Alfonso Portillo and Otto Pérez were named in the Panama Papers, adding more uncertainty to what has already been an unsettled 12 months in the country.

Last autumn, then-president Mr Pérez resigned and was arrested the following day, following the apprehension of vice-president Roxana Baldetti, who had stepped down in August. Both are charged with running a criminal network known as la línea (the line) while in office.

Though the arrests of the country’s two most powerful politicians took place following massive street demonstrations throughout Guatemala, many believe they would not have happened but for the work of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-mandated body that has operated since 2007, charged with investigating criminal organisations and exposing their connections to the state. Led by Colombian judge Iván Velásquez Gómez, the swiftness with which CICIG, along with Guatemala’s Ministerio Público, brought about the downfall of the government was startling, especially given that Mr Pérez had only weeks left in office after 2015’s presidential election.

No consultation

Guatemala’s current president, Jimmy Morales, was elected on the ticket of the Frente de Convergencia Nacional, a party founded by former military officers leaning to the extreme right of the country’s political spectrum. Both before and after Mr Morales assumed office, foreign investment in Guatemala has been marked by controversy. Projects such as the Escobal silver mine, owned by Canadian company Tahoe Resources, in the department of Jalapa, have sprung up with little to no consultation with indigenous communities (Guatemala has the highest indigenous population in Central America) and little transparency, and have frequently resulted in violent clashes.

More worrying still, in April a video surfaced from the Guatemalan department of Huehuetenango showing armed men claiming to be from new rebel group the Fuerzas Armadas Campesinas, vowing to oppose by force a hydroelectric project in the town of Ixquisís.

At the turn of the millennium many might have hoped that endemic corruption and violence were on the wane in the region, but events of recent months, among which the Panama Papers leak is only one, may well have investors thinking twice about Central America.

2015: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

This past year was one in which I struggled with the financial realities of doing serious, independent journalism as much as I ever have in my life, but I was still afforded the chance to visit Cuba for the first-time, return to still-beloved and still-tumultuous Haiti, draw attention to an extraordinary and much-maligned Hudson Valley city and try to reach out to extend aquele abraço to Paris in its moment of great need. Next year, I will be bringing out a new book on Haiti looking at the country's 2004 to 2015 era, and hope to make some progress on getting my fiction before the public, as well. In the meantime, I move forward keeping in mind the words of Federico García Lorca's Cielo Vivo:

Yo no podré quejarme
si no encontré lo que buscaba;
pero me iré al primer paisaje de humedades y latidos
para entender que lo que busco tendrá su blanco de alegría
cuando yo vuele mezclado con el amor y las arenas.

(I won't be able to complain
though I never found what I was looking for;
but I'll go to the first fluid landscape of heartbeats
so I'll know that my search has a joyful target
when I'm flying, jumbled with loved and sandstorms) 

 
Has Guatemala's Long-Awaited Spring Finally Arrived? for InSight Crime (9 December 2015) 

Paris, je t'aime for the Huffington Post (20 November 2015)

Interview on the attempt by the Republic of Congo's Denis Sassou Nguesso to cling to power in Brazzaville for France 24 (20 October 2015)

Conversation with Juliana Barbassa about her book Devil in the City of God: Rio de Janeiro on the Brink and the state of modern Brazil here at Books & Book in Miami (7 August 2015)

In Mexico’s Veracruz, violence stalks journalists and students for Fusion (4 August 2015)

 

Could the gangs of Port-au-Prince form a pact to revitalise Haiti's capital? for the Guardian (14 July 2015) 

Making sense of Miami: what America's strangest city says about the US's future for the Guardian (2 July 2015)

Letter from Havana for the Guardian (17 June 2015)

In from the cold: the implications of the US's thawing on Cuba for Foreign Direct Investment (12 June 2015)

 

Resurrecting Newburgh for the Guardian (8 April 2015) 

The Dominican Republic's decade of diversification for Foreign Direct Investment (12 February 2015)

Has Guatemala's Long-Awaited Spring Finally Arrived?

Has Guatemala's Long-Awaited Spring Finally Arrived?

By Michael Deibert

When former comedian Jimmy Morales was elected as Guatemala’s president as the candidate for the Frente de Convergencia Nacional (FCN) this past October, his victory came at the conclusion of perhaps the most tumultuous few weeks the country has seen since the end of its 30-year civil war in 1996.

Central America’s most populous country and its largest economy, Guatemala has often been the called the Land of Eternal Spring due to its temperate highland climate. By the 1980s, in the middle of a three decade long civil war, some added “Land of Eternal Tyranny” to the description in reference to its long list of sanguinary military governments.

In the 20 years since then, Guatemalans have enjoyed democracy, of a sort. Elections were held on schedule and with regularity, and an alternating series of civilian presidents from political parties of various ideological stripes have all taken their turn in steering the ship of state. Violence and corruption, often with official complicity, however, have continued to darken the country’s political landscape, often coupled with a pervasive and corrosive impunity benefiting those perpetuating it.

Following the 1996 peace accords, Presidents 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 civil war’s worst human rights abuses), implemented many key provisions of the peace accords half-heartedly, if at all. By then, Guatemala's clandestine criminal networks had spent a decade successfully inserting themselves into virtually every manifestation of the state.

By 2005, the government of then-president Oscar Berger warned that Los Zetas, then enforcers for the Mexico’s Gulf Cartel and since 2010 an independent drug trafficking organization in their own right, were recruiting into their ranks members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics, and which boasted a horrific human rights record in Guatemala itself. Los Zetas expanded their control of the country roughly at the same time as the beginning of the mandate of Álvaro Colom, who had become president the previous January as the candidate of the of the left-centre Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE), and his tenure would forever be marked for their violence.

The July 2010 killing of Obdulio Solórzano, a former Escuintla deputy and member of UNE’s executive committee as he drove through Guatemala City’s Zona 13 district, helped to reveal just how deep the links between crime and politics were.
 
After his stint in Guatemala’s congress, Solórzano had gone on to head the Fondo Nacional para la Paz (National Foundation for Peace or Fonapaz), a government organization set up in 1991 with the stated aim of funding programs to eliminate poverty. During his tenure it was discovered that some 1.4 billion quetzales (as the Guatemalan currency is known) could not be accounted for, and that some 32 NGO projects had been overvalued to the tune of Q93.7 million. He was dismissed in June 2009.
 
According to a Guatemala official I spoke with, Solórzano had long been the link between the San Marcos drug lord Juan “Chamalé” Ortíz - credited with first bringing Los Zetas to Guatemala - and several other drug traffickers and certain elements of the UNE. It was speculated that some of the inconsistencies in accounting during his time at Fonapaz may have been attempts to launder illicit drug profits. Jose Rubén Zamora, the crusading editor of Guatemala’s El Periódico, would later say that Guatemalan army general Mauro “Gerónimo” Jacinto (who was himself later murdered) described to him how Solórzano had funneled millions of dollars from drug traffickers such as Juancho León and from Los Zetas themselves into UNE campaign coffers to help Colom triumph in the second round of the contest over former general Otto Pérez Molina.
 
After Guatemala’s November 2011 presidential elections - which in the final round saw Otto Pérez Molina defeat a congressmen from El Petén of equally dubious reputation named Manuel Baldizón, Pérez Molina  announced that his government would have “a strategic plan to combat drug trafficking...in coordination with authorities in the United States and Mexico.”

But things were murkier than they appeared, as was demonstrated when Pérez Molina’s personal pilot, Haward Gilbert Suhr, the founder of the Aeroservicios Centroamericanos, S.A. group (which Pérez Molina was a shareholder in) was arrested along with a dozen other in San Pedro Sula, Honduras and charged with trafficking drug shipments on behalf of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel.

Finally, this past October, Otto Pérez Molina, resigned amid a corruption scandal that had reached the very pinnacle of the country’s political establishment, and was jailed the following day. The country’s former Vice President (she resigned in May), Roxana Baldetti, had been arrested and imprisoned in 21 August. Both are charged with running a criminal network known as La línea (The Line) while in office.
 
The arrests of the country’s two most powerful politicians took place following massive street demonstrations throughout Guatemala, and represented perhaps the apex thus far of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body that has operated since 2007, charged with investigating criminal organizations and exposing their relation to the state. Led by the Colombia judge Iván Velásquez Gómez, the swiftness with which CICIG, along with Guatemala’s Ministerio Público, brought about the downfall of the government was startling, especially given that Pérez Molina had only weeks left in office after this year’s presidential election,.

And what now in Guatemala? President-elect Jimmy Morales’ FCN was founded by former military officers leaning to the extreme right of the country’s military spectrum, including José Luis Quilo Ayuso, an associate of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, who currently has a possible genocide trial looming before him.

Will events of recent months mark a definitive break from Guatemala’s corrupt past? Despite the valiant efforts of Guatemala’s civil society. Guatemalan criminal organizations continue to make use of street-level gangsters as foot soldiers, as is evidence by an event several years ago that took place in Guatemala’s lethal and dysfunctional prison system, specifically the Varones in Guatemala City’s Zone 18 district, as was described to me by someone with direct knowledge of the case.

The impetus for the crisis was apparently precipitated by the presence in the prison of two well- known kidnappers, Rigoberto Morales Barrientos, alias Rigo Rico, and Jorge Mario Moreira alias El Marino. A senior government official allegedly received a sum of around 2 million quetzales (about USD 250,000) from the families of those victimized by the kidnappers to facilitate their execution inside the prison. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, the individual then moved Morales Barrientos and Mario Moreira into two adjoining cells along with two other high-profile prisoners. These prisoners were Axel Danilo Ramirez Espinoza, aka El Smiley, a confessed member of the Mara Salvatrucha gang accused of participating in a wave of slayings of bus drivers that occurred in 2009 and Daniel Pérez Rojas alias El Cachetes, a Mexican citizen convicted this year of involvement in the March 2008 slaying of drug lord Juancho León, Shortly after the prisoners were moved, the CICIG received credible information that the men were to be murdered within hours and sent a delegation to the prison under the pretext that the prison would be receiving donation of closed circuit cameras and that it needed to be determined exactly how many would be needed. Once in the prison, they found the prisoners in two cells adjoining a cell of several gang members who were found to be in possession of several firearms and other weapons. The targeted prisoners were moved, and the incident was never made public.

The Morales presidency, which, despite often being erroneously portrayed as an outsider in the English-language press, is a creation of some of the most recalcitrant members of Guatemalan society, makes it hard for one to believe that Guatemala is not entering a key moment in its battle against impunity and corruption and that, in a year or two, Guatemala’s citizens will be on the streets in protest once again.

(This text was adapted from an address given by the author at an October 2015 conference on Gangs & Drug Trafficking in Central America coordinated by the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies and the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS) at the University of Pittsburgh, with sponsorship from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for International Studies.)

Pastoral letter from El Petén Bishop Mario Fiandri following killing of environmental activist Rigoberto Lima Choc

              
            COMUNICADO DEL VICARIATO APOSTÓLICO DE PETÉN


«Yahveh dijo a Caín: “¿Dónde está tu hermano Abel? ¿Qué has hecho?   
¡La sangre de tu hermano clama a mí!”» (del libro del Génesis: 4,9-10)

A los Fieles Católicos del Vicariato Apostólico de Petén
A las Autoridades Nacionales y Departamentales
A los Hombres y Mujeres de buena voluntad de Petén

Con mucha tristeza y con mucha preocupación constato que la violencia acecha nuevamente a nuestro querido Petén, con el asesinato de Rigoberto Lima Choc, en Sayaxché, en el contexto de un serio y múltiple conflicto social.

Como pastor y representante la Iglesia Católica de Petén y como miembro del Pueblo de Petén, me siente llamado a intervenir con sentido de responsabilidad, y a manifestar mi sentir y mi orientación moral.

—  Con toda claridad expreso mi más profundo dolor y mi más enérgica condena del asesinato del profesor Rigoberto Lima Choc, dentro de una situación generalizada de violencia social e inseguridad personal.

—  Comparto la pena y las lágrimas de la familia del profesor Rigoberto Lima Choc, y acompaño a sus seres queridos con mi cariño y mi oración fraterna.

—  Como cristiano y seguidor del Dios de la Vida, en nombre mío personal y en nombre de la Iglesia de Petén, renuevo el compromiso abierto y decidido a favor de la vida, del respeto de todos los seres humanos y de sus derechos, y del bien común del Pueblo Petenero. 

Y animado y motivado por la fe cristiana y por la búsqueda del bien común pido:

1. Que las autoridades intervengan con decisión, e investiguen pronta y exhaustivamente el crimen, para capturar y aplicar la justicia para los responsables.

2. Que ante la situación tan compleja, difícil y dolorosa, no se busquen soluciones superficiales o momentáneas, sino soluciones reales y permanentes, por la vía del diálogo constructivo entre todas las personas y organizaciones e instituciones involucradas, tocando las raíces profundas de esta situación, en el pleno respeto de las personas y del medio ambiente.

3. Que se deponga toda acción violenta y toda medida de hecho, utilizando los caminos  civilizados adecuados y los órganos legales y judiciales correspondientes.

A este respeto, me permito compartir estas sabias indicaciones del Papa Francisco: «Tenemos que volver a llevar la dignidad humana al centro, y que sobre ese pilar se construyan las estructuras sociales alternativas que necesitamos. Hay que hacerlo con coraje, pero también con inteligencia. Con tenacidad, pero sin fanatismo. Con pasión, pero sin violencia. Y entre todos, enfrentando los conflictos sin quedar atrapados en ellos, buscando siempre resolver las tensiones para alcanzar un plano superior de unidad, de paz y de justicia» (Papa Francisco a los participantes en el Encuentro Mundial de Movimientos Populares, martes 28 de octubre de 2014).

4. Que la gente de Petén, y -en especial- de la zona más directamente afectada por los hechos, guarde la calma y la responsabilidad que la gravedad del momento exige. Es necesaria la participación y la honesta colaboración de todos/as, así como la vigilancia y la denuncia de cualquier abuso.

5. Que los autores intelectuales y materiales de este crimen se arrepientan y se conviertan, teniendo presente la 'imagen y semejanza de Dios' marcada en su persona, y el mandamiento absoluto de Dios: ¡No matarás!

Con la fe puesta en el Señor Jesús, vencedor del pecado y de la muerte, animo a los hombres y a las mujeres de buena voluntad de Petén a vivir -en el día a día- el respeto y la tolerancia pacífica, el perdón y la solidaridad, seguros de que el mal sólo se vence con el bien; y que el bien triunfará sobre el mal, para un Petén distinto, más justo y más vivible y más feliz para todos/as.

Rezo y pido a todos/as rezar -personalmente y en familia y en comunidad- por la paz en Petén,
viviendo la fe y testimoniándola con las obras.

Su hermano: 
Mario Fiandri, Obispo 
Vicariato Apostólico de Petén

Ciudad Flores, Petén, 19 de septiembre de 2015.

A melancholy anniversary

It was 59 years ago today that Guatemala's democratically-elected president Jacobo Árbenz was overthrown in a CIA-engineered coup. Among those caught up in the upheaval in Guatemala at the time - and the mass repression against Árbenz's partisans and the left in general - was an Argentine physician named Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Guevara subsequently fled to Mexico where he met a Cuban exile there named Fidel Castro...The complicating ironies of history...

Books in 2012: A Personal Selection

Though intense work on my forthcoming book Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books) and a new project looking at Mexico meant that I wasn’t able to read as much for pleasure as I ordinarily would (something I hope to remedy in the coming year), some interesting tomes nevertheless crossed my radar. Here are some of the most intriguing of them.  

With all best wishes for 2013,  

MD

A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe  

The Nigerian author’s bitter and brilliant 1966 novel about “the corroding effect of privilege” in post-independence Nigeria sees Achebe turning his sharp eye to the acquisitiveness and moral turpitude of the country’s political elite to nearly as great an impact as he examined the destruction of traditional society in a more famous novel, 1958’s Things Fall Apart.

Up Above the World by Paul Bowles   

Chilly, distant and more than a little strange, the American author’s take on Guatemala reminds one of the lineage of U.S. literature that traces back to Edgar Allan Poe, and how the knowledge that comes from actually being in the world, as opposed to just writing about it, adds to the power of the printed page.

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain   

At times overly-garrulous but nevertheless entertaining and enjoyable, Anthony Bourdain’s tale of a misspent youth passed between cuisine high and low was something I have been wanting to get around to reading for a long time and am glad that I finally did.

Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett  

A linguistic detective story and a thrilling and respectful account of the author’s years living among the Pirahã in the Brazilian Amazon, this book shows how even the most arcane academic pursuits can be riveting in the rights hands. Though the Pirahã can, quite frankly, sometimes come off as petty, vengeful, cachaça-swilling brutes, Everett’s hard-won insistence that we meet them on their own terms is a refreshing antidote to armchair academia posing as insight. A most unique and enjoyable read.

Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel - An Astonishing True Story of Murder Money and International Corruption By Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen   

An engrossing account of the early to mid period Medellín cartel - Pablo Escobar., Jorge Luis Ochoa Vázquez y su familia, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha  and Carlos Lehder - and their American enablers and Colombian and American pursuers. Published back in 1989, the book hearkens back to the days when journalists, well, actually knew something about the subjects they wrote books about. 

Angola from Afro-Stalinism to Petro-Diamond Capitalism by Tony Hodges   

A highly informative if often rather dry account of Angola post-1975 independence to the dawn of the 21st century.

 Beyond the Mexique Bay by Aldous Huxley  

Interesting if often somewhat unpleasantly misanthropic portrait of the writer’s travels through Mexico and Guatemala. Huxley seems as if he would have been a most disagreeable traveling companion: Pissy, prissy, at time unthinkingly bigoted and always, it seems, pining for dear old  England.

Michael Manley: The Making of a Leader by Darrel E. Levi  

An illuminating biography of the nearly-forgotten leader of Jamaica’s People’s National Party, this now-sadly-out-of-print portrait is sympathetic but never hagiographic, recalling such forgotten bits as the sadistic brutality of Manley’s Jamaican education and his brief stint as a journalist, and casting a light back to a time when Jamaica was an important player on the regional stage.

The Rwanda Crisis : History of a Genocide by Gérard  Prunier   

Far more authoritative than Philip Gourevitch’s better-known We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, this book by one of the world’s greatest living Africa scholars looks at the background of one of the last century’s great crimes and why the world failed to stop it.

Defeat is the Only Bad News: Rwanda Under Musinga, 1896-1931 by Alison Liebhafsky des Forges  

As an authoritative account of the reign of the Rwandan monarch Yuhi V (born Yuhi Musinga), this book by one of the world’s great Africa scholars, whose life was tragically cut short, examines the complex links of Tutsi royalty with at first German and then Belgian colonial powers in Rwanda.

Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland by Basharat Peer  

A welcome addition to the dearth of literature on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir by the Kashmiris themselves, Peer’s book nevertheless sometimes reads like confusingly-organized journalist’s notes in search of unifying thread, robbing the overall narrative of any great cumulative emotional impact. Peer is particularly effective when writing about his immediate circle of family and friends, though, and the book adds some sickening details of India’s excesses in its most restive region but, to my mind, the most authoritative Kashmiri voice on the conflict remains the late poet Agha Shadid Ali, whose collection The Country Without a Post Office was one of the highlights of my 2010 reading season.

2011: A Reporter's Notebook of the Year Gone By

A little later posting this than usual, but nevertheless hopefully a useful review of the subjects that I wrote about over the past year. Welcome 2012, out with the old and in with the new, onward and upward.

MD


Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’ for the Miami Herald (11 December 2011)

Notes on Matthew J. Smith's Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 for Small Axe (November 2011)

Concern Grows Over Plan to Drill for Oil Near Florida Keys for the Huffington Post and Panos Caribbean (4 October 2011)

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala for the Huffington Post (10 September 2011)

Michael Deibert interview on the United Nations mission in Haiti on CBC's The Current (7 September 2011)

The U.N. in Haiti: Time to Adapt or Time to Go for Truthdig (1 September 2011)

New Orleans' Tragedy and Triumph on 6-Year Katrina Anniversary for the Huffington Post (29 August 2011)

Notes from Haiti's Long Hot Summer for the Huffington Post (23 August 2011)

What James Craig Anderson's Killing Means to America for the Huffington Post (9 August 2011)

On the passing of Jean-Claude Bajeux for AlterPresse (8 August 2011)

Old Habits Die Hard in New Orleans for Truthdig (20 June 2011)

Michael Deibert on drug trafficking and organized crime in Mexico and Guatemala for You Tube (31 May 2011)

Mladic, Chomsky and Srebrenica: Time for an apology for Michael Deibert’s Blog (26 May 2011)

Mexico’s Cartel Wars for Truthdig (16 May 2011)

Border region lives in fear amid Mexico cartel war for Agence France Presse (12 May 2011)

Note on Jean-Bertrand Aristide's return to Haiti for Michael Deibert’s Blog (18 March 2011)

Haiti’s Aristide should be greeted with prosecution, not praise for AlterPresse (17 February 2011)

A Nightmare Returns to Haiti for CNN (19 January 2011)

Guatemala: Caught in the crossfire for the Miami Herald (18 January 2011)

Books in 2011: A Personal Selection

During 2011, a year of pretty much unending rough waters, a number of interesting books nevertheless came into my life and. As I have done in years past, I wanted to share my thoughts about some of the more notable ones here.

Best regards and hopes for a 2012 with more love, peace, prosperity and life.

Ayibobo.

MD


A Palace in the Old Village By Tahar Ben Jelloun


A moving and perceptive chronicle of the lives of a Moroccan immigrant and his family in modern France, Ben Jelloun's novel descends into surrealistic absurdity in its final pages but before doing so nevertheless gives us an important glimpse into the experience of the “new” French in their adopted country.


Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983 by Virginia Garrard-Burnett


An important and exquisitely researched book that sheds light on one of the most violent periods of Guatemala’s violent history, this work by University of Texas professor Virginia Garrard-Burnett examines the March 1982 to August 1983 rule of Efraín Ríos Montt. Ríos Montt, a former general, candidate in the 1974 Guatemalan elections (which he likely won but had stolen from him by the same military he had once served) and subsequent founder of Frente Republicano Guatemalteco, seized power from another military man, General Romeo Lucas García, who had presided over what Garrard-Burnett characterizes as “a rapid downward spiral of capricious violence and death.” Those hoping for a break in the country’s civil war, however, - which would only end with 1996 peace accords - were in for a rude awakening. Ríos Montt’s anti-guerrilla campaign, centred largely on indigenous peasant communities, was “more methodical and less chaotic than Lucas García counterinsurgency, but it was also more deadly.”

Ríos Montt’s idiosyncratic populism at the time, propelled forward by his evangelical Christianity, revealed the general to be “anything but a puppet of the far right,” notes Garrard-Burnett. “(He) believed himself to be a prophetic leader, brought by Providence to power at a particular moment in history in which he could lead the people of Guatemala against the forces of evil that besieged them on every side.”

The result was cataclysm, and Garrard-Burnett expertly documents it in great detail here.


Lords of Misrule: Mardi Gras and the Politics of Race in New Orleans by James Gill


A book about the often racially-charged origins of some of the major krewes of New Orleans' storied Mardi Gras (such as Comus, Rex and Momus), this book by a British-transplant living in New Orleans masterfully draws back the curtain on an aspect of the city's carnival revelry that many in its still-ossified economic structure would likely just as soon forget.


The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? By Francisco Goldman


A gripping account of the investigation into the April 1998 murder of Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera, this book (written by the Guatemalan-American novelist Francisco Goldman) reads like a detective novel and reveals the corrupt linkages of Guatemala’s criminal and military elements. A compelling picture of the struggles of committed individuals against a diffuse and often lethal enemy, it also contains disturbing suggestions about the activities of Guatemala’s incoming president, former General Otto Pérez Molina.


Carnival of Fury: Robert Charles and the New Orleans Race Riot of 1900 by William Ivy Hair


More a pogrom against the Africa-American population of New Orleans than a riot, this account by Ivy Hair tells the story of Robert Charles and, along with the work of historians like John Hope Franklin, serves as an important reminder to Americans of the brutal injustices inflicted on African-Americans after the Civil War, all in the name of scuttling the aims of Reconstruction in the American South.


The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge by Paul Preston


Another example of how a military leader viewed a civil war as a moral-religious crusade, this book by one of the best historians of Span’s recent history makes one wonder how Spain’s Francisco Franco escaped his proper place in the annals of history’s great monsters alongside Hitler and Stalin.

The scale of the slaughter by Franco’s forces - 3,000 killed in Zamora, 3,000 in Valladolid, 2,789 in Navarra, and on and on - still shocks, and Preston lays blame where it belongs, on the shoulders of such largely forgotten Francoist chieftains as General Juan Yague. Preston’s deft exposure of Franc’s “notion of a war of moral redemption by terror,” makes one look forward with expectation to his forthcoming book, author of the much-anticipated forthcoming The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.


Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe by Gérard Prunier


An expansive yet nuanced view of the first and second Congo wars, this book is an essential addition to scholarship on the region. Prunier, a longtime observer, analyst and resident of Central Africa, is also an unusually honest and self-critical academic, a fact that adds gravitas to his criticisms of African governments and the international community when dealing with the region’s severe, but by no means intractable, problems.


Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth by Erin Siegal


This debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb? But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited? I reviewed it for the Miami Herald.


Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns


An interesting book that very laudably seeks to bring the experiences of the Congolese themselves in their own voices to the forefront of an account of that country’s ongoing conflicts. Perhaps a little soft for my taste in its assessments of the failings of the international community and non-governmental organizations operating in Central Africa, but all in all a highly worthwhile read that brings the reality of the conflict home via the eloquent voices of the Congolese who suffered its consequences


Rigoberta Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans by David Stoll


A serious and groundbreaking scholarly work that was unfortunately subject to rather vehemently libelous calumny when it first appeared in 1999, this book sees Stoll - probably the best American anthropologist working on Guatemala - examining both the specifics and broader historical context of the autobiography of perhaps the most famous living Guatemalan. On the way, much as he did with his excellent previous volume, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala, Stoll gives the reader of nuanced picture of the torturous position that Guatemala’s indigenous population found itself in during that country’s long civil war and raises some troubling questions about the veracity of Menchu’s famous autobiography.


Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson


A relic from the days when American cultural and political commentators actually had a brain, this collection of loosely-connected short stories casts a witty and darkly jaundiced eye on the upper-middle classes of a fictional bedroom community outside of New York, and within the city itself during the years between the great wars. Wilson, who had previously made his mark with his history of revolutionary thought in Europe, To the Finland Station, was as original and probing a mind as American letters has produced.

Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’

Posted on Sun, Dec. 11, 2011

Review of Erin Siegal’s ‘Finding Fernanda’

By Michael Deibert

The Miami Herald

Finding Fernanda: Two Mothers, One Child, and a Cross-Border Search for Truth.

Erin Siegal.

Cathexis.

300 pages.

$14.95.

(Read the original review here)

The debut book by journalist and photographer Erin Siegal has a mystery at its core: What happened to the two young daughters of an impoverished Guatemala woman named Mildred Alvarado, one of whom was literally snatched from her mother’s womb?

But the book — comprised of heavy-duty investigative reporting and compelling personal testimony — also examines another mystery: How could so many people in Guatemala and the United States turn a blind eye for so long to an industry that, far from being motivated by the altruistic urge to unite needy children with loving families, has become a world where adults dole out children like cards from a deck and view their young lives as little more than a commodity to be exploited?

Siegal does a compelling job of sketching out the drumbeat of poverty and fear, born of economic and criminal violence, that makes up the daily lives of so many Guatemalans today, 15 years after a peace agreement ended a 30-year civil war in which some 200,000 people died. Siegal also delves with considerable expertise into Guatemala’s labyrinthine and often corrupt legal system, painstakingly outlining its connections with U.S. organizations, some legitimate and some not.

Early on in the book, then-U.S. ambassador to Guatemala Prudence Bushnell — a diplomat who flits in and out of history from Rwanda to Kenya to Guatemala — warns in a prescient February 2002 memo that if the United States did not “come up with resources to investigate the suspicious (adoption) cases in a timely manner . . . [the U.S. could be] accused of abetting baby trafficking.”

The advice was largely ignored, with the behavior of U.S. embassy staff in Guatemala appearing alternately ham-handed and heartless as Alvarado tries to recover her children. Lax oversight by the Florida Department of Children and Families of the overseas adoption practices of companies operating in the state completes a picture of indifference to the children at the center of the adoption industry. Some practices were allowed to function long after red flags had been raised about criminal conduct.

This pattern continues even in the face of a report by the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations, that between 2008 and 2010 only 10 percent of children who left Guatemala for adoption were legal orphans.

Some of the details of the dark side of the industry in Guatemala — houses where pregnant women are kept while waiting to give birth, nurseries where children waiting to be adopted are given borderline-starvation levels of sustenance — are Dickensian in their cruelty. But the tone of the book is, perhaps surprisingly, not despairing. Siegal brings welcome attention to the work of the Fundación Sobrevivientes (Survivor’s Foundation), a women’s rights organization founded by an ex-guerrilla, Norma Cruz, that has grown into one of the most important pillars of the country’s fragile civil society.

Upon finishing Finding Fernanda, one realizes that supporting of that very civil society, along with the work of bodies such as CICIG, will advance the cause of justice for victims such as Alvarado. Along with its moving personal story of a family torn asunder, Finding Fernanda can also be read as a call to action.

Michael Deibert is the author of the forthcoming Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair (Zed Books).

Carlos Castresana responds to the Economist

Carlos Castresana, the former head of the United Nations-mandated Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG) - the body charged with investigating clandestine organisations and exposing their relation to the Guatemalan state - responded this week to what I thought was a fairly awful article in the Economist about Guatemala last month.

The Economist piece, titled "Parachuting in the prosecutors," repeated pretty much every slur and innuendo against Castresana that the UN bureaucrats who served as nearly as great a hurdle to CICIG's success as Guatemala's criminals have ever whispered about the Spanish prosecutor in their sleek halls along the East River.

Given what I believe is the important role that CICIG may still play in the fight against the criminal oligarchy whose power is pointed like a dagger at the heart of Guatemala democracy, I thought it worth re-printing Castresana's response in full here.

For my views on that oligarchy, readers can look at my 2008 piece, "Drugs Vs. Democracy in Guatemala," first published in the World Policy Jounal, or my Op-Ed last year in the Guardian, "Guatemala's lonely battle against corruption."

MD


Carlos Castresana

SIR – I want to express my surprise and disappointment at the remarks you made about me in your article on the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), which I headed until June 2010 (“Parachuting in the prosecutors”, October 15th). Your description of me as a “clever, cavalier and publicity-seeking Spanish prosecutor” was unfair to say the least. My team and I did our best during three years, risking our families, lives and careers.

I was also offended by your statement that I left CICIG in June 2010 after allegations about my private life. I refer you to a complete and balanced explanation of the circumstances of my resignation in your own pages from an article at the time (“Kamikaze mission”, June 19th 2010).

But more disturbing was your observation that “there was little oversight of Mr Castresana, causing discomfort in New York about how CICIG was operating”. In fact, CICIG was permanently supervised and its accounts audited by the United Nations Development Programme, as that was the agency which managed the donor countries’ trust fund. All substantive matters were exhaustively controlled by the UN Department of Political Affairs and supervised by the secretary-general himself. I sent 314 cables to the UN and reported daily by telephone, and in person in New York every couple of months, as well as filing ten quarterly reports to the secretary-general throughout the three years of my mandate.

Furthermore, while you were publishing your biased report a selection process was under way for an international judicial position for which I was included as a candidate. You might not have been aware of that ongoing process, but surely some of your sources were. I am persuaded that those who made the decision were not influenced at all by your publication, but the fact is that your article appeared just after the interviews, when a decision was being made.

I made many enemies in Guatemala. I am not worried about that, it comes with the job of prosecutor. But on future occasions, before you publish such disinformation, please call me and give me the opportunity to defend my name and my professional work in advance. That way you might get a better and complete story.

Carlos Castresana
Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Spain
Madrid

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala

Posted: 9/10/11 03:57 PM ET

Ballots and Bullets in Guatemala

By Michael Deibert

(This article was also cross-posted on the Huffington Post and can be read here)

Guatemalans will go to the polls in the fourth presidential election since 1996 peace accords ended that country's 30-year civil war, a conflict that claimed the lives of over 200,000 people, mostly indigenous campesinos caught in the struggle between a militarily-weak leftist insurgency and the ruthless scorched-earth tactics of a national army.

The likely winner of the election will be the man who represented that army during those accords, 60 year-old retired general Otto Pérez Molina. A recent poll by the Guatemala firm Borge y Asociados gave Pérez Molina 48.9 percent of the vote, nearly enough to avoid a November runoff ballot.

Pérez Molina's rise in Guatemalan politics says much about the unfulfilled promise of those 15 year-old accords, and about the vexing problems that still confront Central America's most populous country.

A 1973 graduate of Guatemala's military academy, Pérez Molina came of age in a country ruled by military dictators and where the military itself was divided between those who advocated a take-no-prisoners approach to prosecuting Guatemala's civil war and others who others who advocated a strategy of pacification and stabilization, combining development projects and military objectives while killing only as many rebels and suspected sympathizers as "needed" to be killed.

This is what passed for enlightenment during the civil war, and, though Pérez Molina allied himself with the latter camp, enlightenment proved to be a relative term.

By the summer of 1982, the country was under the rule of Efraín Ríos Montt, a former general turned born-again evangelical Christian who had seized power after the chaotic four-year reign of General Fernando Romeo Lucas García.

Pérez Molina was serving as a military commander in El Quiché, one of Guatemala's most heavily indigenous and war-wracked provinces, when Ríos Montt launched what was dubbed Victoria (Victory) 82, a military offensive that the historian Virginia Garrard-Burnett has written led to "the period of most extreme violence committed in the name of counterinsurgency" during the war, and which was particularly furious in El Quiché's northern region.

By 1993, Pérez Molina had risen to become chief of staff of the army's intelligence wing, known as D-2, and it was in this capacity that he led a faction of the military that successfully opposed then-president Jorge Serrano Elías' attempt to seize dictatorial powers that same year. Another sector of the military, led by Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo, supported Serrano's self-coup.

The conflict caused deep enmity between the two groups which continues to color Guatemalan political life even today, as one side or the other vies for positions of power and influence within the Guatemalan state.

Pérez Molina subsequently served as the chief of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP or presidential general staff) of Serrano's successor, Ramiro de León Carpio, until 1995.

A kind of state within the state, the EMP was disbanded in 2003 due to its links to appalling human rights abuses, including the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas González Dubón while Pérez Molina was at its helm.

The group has also been linked to the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack and the 1998 beating death of Bishop Juan Gerardi two days after a group he headed published a report laying the vast majority of deaths during the country's civil war at the feet of the Guatemalan military.

Selected as head the of the Guatemalan delegation to the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC in 1998, Pérez Molina retired from the military in 2000 before forming the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party) in February 2001.

An important backer of the 2004-2008 presidency of Óscar Berger, Pérez Molina narrowly lost the 2007 presidential elections to Álvaro Colom of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza.

As a politician whose symbol is a closed fist and whose slogan is mano dura (strong hand), Pérez Molina has sought, with success, to portray himself as a law-and-order candidate in a country that is threatening to drown in violence as at no time since the civil war. While to the north 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.

In addition to a long-standing problem with local maras (street gangs), Mexican cartels pushed south by President Felipe Calderón's militarized campaign against drug traffickers there now do battle with Guatemala's own criminal groups, some of whom have their roots in a military intelligence apparatus set up with U.S. aid during the country's internal armed conflict.

None of the former have made as much of an impression in Guatemala as Los Zetas.

Originally members of a Mexican army unit designed to combat drug trafficking, Los Zetas (named after a radio code for high-ranking officers) defected from the military in the late 1990s to become enforcers for the Matamoros-based Gulf Cartel. They later abandoned their employers to become an international organized-crime entity in their own right, and in recent years have been reinforced by members of Los Kabiles, a special-operations unit of the Guatemalan army trained in jungle warfare and counterinsurgency tactics.

Los Zetas announced their presence in Guatemala in spectacular fashion with the March 2008 killing of kingpin Juan "Juancho" José León Ardón and 10 other people in the eastern state of Zacapa.

They subsequently established a strong foothold in the country, but especially in the departments of El Petén and Alta Verapaz in the north, and Izabal in the east.

This past May, 27 farm workers were found massacred in El Petén, a crime blamed on Los Zetas. Subsequently the dismembered body of the prosecutor investigating the case was found in Alta Verapaz, Both departments have been subject to state of siege orders during the Colom presidency. Mass casualty shootouts in various parts of the country have become commonplace.

It is perhaps little wonder then that Guatemalans long for a commanding figure to take over the reins of this troubled land.

Pérez Molina has been helped along by the disqualification of his main opponent, Sandra Torres. Guatemala's First Lady and wife of the current president until her divorce in April, Torres' candidacy was ruled illegal by the country's Constitutional Court under Article 186 of Guatemala's constitution, which forbids family members of the president or vice-president from running for either of those positions.

The law, which also prohibits those who have seized power in a coup d'état from running, was ignored during the 2003 presidential candidacy of Efraín Ríos Montt.

The slickness and professionalism of Pérez Molina's campaign, along with those of protégées such as Guatemala City mayoral candidate Alejandro Sinibaldi, has stood in marked contrast to the hapless efforts of the Torres camp. The struggle of other candidates to make themselves heard in the face of conservative media empires that often refuse to even air their advertisements has also been an asset.

Despite his reinvention of himself as a political leader, though, allegations of human rights abuses during his time in the military - and connections to organized crime both during and since - have continued to dog Pérez Molina

In July of this year, the indigenous Guatemalan organization Waqib Kej sent a letter to the United Nationas accusing Pérez Molina of involvement in torture and genocide during his time in the army, while accusations of his alleged involvement in the disappearance of rebel commander Efraín Bámaca Velásquez in 1992 have never been satisfactorily explained.

Rubén Chanax Sontay, one of the chief witnesses for the investigation of the Bishop Gerardi killing, placed Pérez Molina in the company of Colonel Byron Lima Estrada on the night of Gerardi's slaying. Lima Estrada was subsequently convicted along with three other men of Gerardi's murder.

In addition, Pérez Molina has often been mentioned as one of the alleged more prominent members of El Sindicato, a clandestine network of current and former military officers often at odds with a similar entity, La Cofradia, originally domintaed by Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo. In March 2002, the U.S. government revoked the latter's travel visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing action against people who have allowed or conspired in drug trafficking.

For his part, Pérez Molina has always vigorously denied all these charges.

[Pérez Molina's nearest competitor in the presidential contest, Manuel Baldizón, a congressmen form El Petén, is also trailed by accusations of corruption and abuse of power.]

In the background of Pérez Molina's political ambitions, there has been Guatemala's own struggle to move on from its tortured past.

Many key provisions of Guatemala's peace accords were implemented half-heartedly, if at all.

A civilian intelligence office mandated to combat organized crime was not established until 2007, by which point 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. According to UNICEF, despite its lush and varied topography, malnutrition affects one in two Guatemalan children under five, the sixth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world.

Since 2007, the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (CICIG), a United Nations-mandated body charged with investigating criminal organizations and exposing their relation to the state, has been operating with varying degrees of success. Until June 2010, CICIG was under the direction of Carlos Castresana, a Spanish magistrate experienced at prosecuting drug-related cases in Mexico. Castresana resigned last year, charging the Colom government was undermining CICIG's work, and the mantle of leadership was passed to Francisco Dall'Anese Ruiz, the former attorney general of Costa Rica.

After a string of successes, over the last year CICIG appeared to stumble, recently losing high-profile cases against former president Alfonso Portillo and former prison director and presidential candidate Alejandro Giammattei.

Working alongside CICIG, however, Guatemala currently has perhaps its most capable and activist Attorney General in recent memory, Claudia Paz y Paz Bailey.

A specialist in criminal law who helped to found the Instituto de Estudios Comparados de en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala, Paz y Paz replaced a lawyer accused of having links to organized crime (his appointment was later annulled).

If, as seems likely, Pérez Molina is inaugurated as president next year, what kind of Guatemala will he work to build?

Will he, as he has stated, work for law and order, an end to corruption and an economically vibrant nation? Or will the questions from his past prove a mere foreshadowing of a nation even more violent and corrupt than the one that now exists?

Only time will tell, of course, in this land that Pablo Neruda once called "the sweet waist of the Americas" and which Guatemalan poet Otto René Castillo once referred to as "my sweet storm."

Guatemala is the land of eternal spring, and its people are still waiting for that spring to come.

Follow Michael Deibert on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelcdeibert

La marcha imparable de las mafias: El intimidante despojo de propiedades

An important editorial on recent developments in organized crime in Guatemala by El Periódico's Jose Rubén Zamora. MD

País

La marcha imparable de las mafias: El intimidante despojo de propiedades

Jose Rubén Zamora

El Periódico

(Read the original article here)

Ante nuestra mirada estupefacta e irremediable impotencia, las mafias se siguen apoderando de Guatemala. Las estructuras ilegales han diversificado sus negocios, además de mover droga, contrabandear mercaderías y tesoros, traficar y esclavizar personas (sobre todo mujeres y niños) y blanquear sus ilícitas ganancias, ahora despojan propiedades a sus legítimos dueños.


Ya no son simples abogaditos mañosos y sin escrúpulos, especializados en identificar tierras no registradas y que de un plumazo las traspasan a sociedades anónimas de gaveta, ni ladrones de poca monta, que a hurtadillas llegan a arrancar las anotaciones al Registro de la Propiedad.

Ahora son verdaderas redes criminales que le echan el ojo a la propiedad que se les antoja, sea por su posición estratégica o por sus buenas instalaciones para almacenar mercadería ilícita y las roban por las buenas o por las malas.


Esta práctica echa raíces en la historia del país, pero dio un salto brutal en tiempos del Mono de Oro, cuando sus asesores corruptos de cuello blanco descubrieron que, desde el poder, el Estado de Derecho se podía retorcer también para favorecer intereses particulares. Ese es un buen punto de comparación, pues Arzú y sus testaferros garantizaron la impunidad de estafadores financieros, en buena medida estatizando las pérdidas de las financieras privadas a través del CHN, institución que utilizó como banco central de esos estafadores. Mientras, también estos estafadores financieros se robaron Q2.8 millardos a costa de miles de ahorrantes de clase media y media alta, que dolorosamente vieron esfumar su patrimonio, sin encontrar respuesta judicial, pues el régimen de turno fue su tapadera. Además, despojaron con lujo de fuerza e impunidad a empresarios decentes que impulsaban proyectos inmobiliarios. Estos no solo sufrieron el despojo ingrato de sus terrenos y maquinarias, sino que debieron huir del país para no perder lo último: la vida.


Una nueva estructura criminal, conocida en el bajo mundo como la Mafia Itemm, que se ha robustecido blanqueando el dinero del narco, hace su aparición en la carretera a El Salvador, en Las Cañas, Milpas Altas, y en la CA-9, jurisdicción de Palín, Escuintla.


Hace dos años, a unas bonitas bodegas en Fraijanes, carretera a El Salvador, llegaron unas personas en carros de lujo, ropa de boutique y cadenas de oro de muy mal gusto.


Preguntaron por el propietario, un hombre de avanzada edad, quien había invertido en esas instalaciones su jubilación.

Los invasores le gritaron: “Esto es nuestro.” “¡Cómo va a ser!”, replicó el dueño, encolerizado. Los usurpadores llevaban supuestos títulos de propiedad, y el viejo, confiado, los desafío: “Nos veremos en los tribunales”.


Nunca llegaron con el juez. Días más tarde, entrando en sus bodegas, el anciano fue acribillado. Aprovechando la congoja familiar, los truhanes se hicieron de la propiedad con papeles falsos y bajo el amparo de autoridades judiciales.


En otro territorio, en Las Cañas, robaron 4 manzanas de terreno, matando al propietario. El capo juega monopoly al mejor estilo de las mafias de Chicago y de Sicilia de hace un siglo. Mata a quienes despoja, y a sus competidores, pero también a sus socios. Fue el caso, a finales del 2007, de Estuardo Ortiz y del peruano Ricardo Segura, con quienes compartía el negocio de la chatarra, y de Juan Manuel Paiz, también su exsocio en una financiera. Y además le gusta el cobre ajeno: Telgua y la Empresa Eléctrica han enfrentado problemas de transmisión debido a que les hurta el metal.

Otro caso, de la misma banda, ocurrió en diciembre pasado. La táctica, esta vez, fue más sofisticada, aunque también sangrienta. Primero enviaron a Blanca Juárez (foto 1), una mujer de condición humilde, a reclamar la propiedad de una franja de 2 kilómetros de frente por 200 metros de fondo, sobre la CA-9, en Palín. Se trata de una fracción desmembrada de la finca La Compañía, donde ya hay una lotificación desde hace varios años. Por cierto, esta finca la conocí de patojo, pues era propiedad de Tere y Arturo Altolaguirre, los padres de Martita y, junto a la familia, la disfrutamos mientras transcurrían placenteros algunos domingos.

A la señora Juárez le siguió un grupo, encabezado por Paola Flores García, una supuesta Jackie (foto 2), haciéndose acompañar de Víctor Manuel López y José Pelón, lugartenientes del Capo, y media docena de gente armada. Ellos se transportan en una Cherokee P 190 DDH, una camioneta BMW X3 P 547DNH, una Mitsubishi Lance gris P 320 DDP y un picop blanco Chevrolet P 146 DWN.

Paola Flores, una mujer robusta de mediana edad, se identificó como heredera de las tierras. “Yo vivo en Miami y me avisaron que mi papi me dejó esas tierras, que eran de él, y las puso a nombre de algunos de sus empleados, y ahora unos invasores me las están robando”.
El modus operandi de la banda fue así: compraron legalmente unas tierras sobre la CA-9, luego usaron los planos, falsificaron títulos de 1957 y superpusieron la propiedad sobre otra que es legal y legítima. Aunque no cazaban los linderos ni correspondían las vecindades, y sin citar a las partes, la jueza Liliana Joaquín Castillo, del Juzgado 13o. de Primera Instancia Civil, les dio posesión, haciéndoles acompañar fuerzas de la PNC.

De hecho, la banda tiene a sueldo un agente policial, Manuel Rey (foto 3), quien se moviliza en un picop blanco Mitsubishi P 857 DMP e intimida a los legítimos propietarios.

Pero más que intimidar, como ya se vio, esta mafia también asesina. Munir Masis Masis fue otra de sus víctimas. Él poseía una bodega, también comprada de los desmembramientos de la finca La Compañía, y como se resistió al despojo, lo mataron.

No es casualidad que frente a la propiedad invadida por la mafia, está el negocio de chatarra del Capo, a quien la DEA y la CICIG le vienen pisando los talones. Su nombre es Ítem y su fortuna reciente crece a un ritmo exponencial. Lleva una vida digna del jet set, al mismo estilo del Cartel de los Sapos. Pero él sigue campante: sus testaferros ya comenzaron a llamar a los dueños de un tercer terreno, contiguo al que acaban de robar. Dentro de poco sus 2 kilómetros de carretera serán 6. Todo, a ciencia y paciencia de jueces y policías corruptos.

Guatemala, lunes 18 de julio de 2011