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.

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.

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.)

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

Why we defend CICIG

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?

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.