LIBYA: ‘‘King of Kings’’ Gaddafi Tries to Flex Regional Muscles
By Michael Deibert
Inter Press Service
PARIS, Apr 24, 2009 (IPS) - Former pariah and now Europe’s cautious partner, Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi seems determined to flex new-found diplomatic muscles on issues ranging from trade to regional security, North Africa observers say.
Elected to a one-year term to lead the 53-nation African Union (AU) in February, Gaddafi has been acting energetically in that role and in his capacity as the guiding force behind the Communauté des Etats Sahélo-Sahariens (Community of Sahel-Saharan States, or CEN-SAD).
Promoting an idiosyncratic brand of pan-continental leadership, Gaddafi has been welcomed back into the European Union’s (EU) good books after Libya announced in 2003 that it was abandoning its nuclear weapons programme.
He has made his presence felt in recent months on a host of subject affecting relations between Europe and Africa.
Read the full article here.
Saturday, April 25, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
A note on violence at Jawaharlal Nehru University
In early 2007, while reporting on the conflict in India-controlled Kashmir, I sat at a small tea shop in Srinagar discussing the political trajectory of this troubled region with two friends, a Kashmiri attorney named Malik Aijaz Ahmad and a student named Idrees Kanth. I saw in Kashmir, as I have in other countries such as Haiti and Côte d'Ivoire, how the majority of the populace was caught in a vicious war of attraction between opposing sides with very little recourse or protection. It this experience witnessing the situation in Kashmir that led me to write my first long-form feature for the World Policy Journal, the flagship publication of the New York-based World Policy Institute, where I have recently been named a Senior Fellow.
During my time in India, I also became aware of the country’s complicated religious and ethnic dynamic, that on one hand saw frequent and repeated episodes of discrimination and violence against the country’s Muslim minority, but also that representatives of that community could often behave in ways that reeked of intolerance. A recent email from Idrees, studying at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, demonstrates vividly to me that this phenomenon has not abated and that, in fact, violence, even in a university setting, is a fact of life for some Indian students. I print Idrees Kanth’s email, with his permission and in its entirety, below. Note: The ABVP that he refers to stands for the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an extremist Hindu youth group.
MD
******************
Dear All,
We want to bring it to your notice the constant physical and psychological violence that many of us Muslim students have been experiencing at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi over the last two years. Recently on On 17th March a Muslim student Masihullah Khan [ M.A. French] was brutally assaulted by a group of ABVP/RSS students inside Lohit hostel in full view of the Senior Waden and fellow residents. Despite that the administration did not deem it be a serious offence and let them off with very mild punishments, which were then revoked. All that was left of the punishment was hostel transfers, and even those were not carried out.
Exactly a month later on 17th April the same group of students assaulted me [Idrees Kanth] badly and further threatened me of dire consequences. Even after this, the administration on one ground or other ['humanitarian considerations' is what the administration said] has been protecting them making us feel not only very vulnerable but traumatised. Such an attitude of the administration has only emboldened these hooligans who are now openly targeting us.
It is a common knowledge among students in JNU that the administration is completely right wing. In the past if by any chance a Dalit or a Muslim student was involved even in a minor act of indiscipline, the student was severely punished and even rusticated.
We therefore, appeal to you all to build an opinion on such a stark and open communal policy of the JNU administration and the growing communal violence on the campus. We are being constantly threatened, intimidated, abused, physically beaten etc etc. We feel completely helpless !!!
Thanks,
Idrees Kanth
During my time in India, I also became aware of the country’s complicated religious and ethnic dynamic, that on one hand saw frequent and repeated episodes of discrimination and violence against the country’s Muslim minority, but also that representatives of that community could often behave in ways that reeked of intolerance. A recent email from Idrees, studying at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, demonstrates vividly to me that this phenomenon has not abated and that, in fact, violence, even in a university setting, is a fact of life for some Indian students. I print Idrees Kanth’s email, with his permission and in its entirety, below. Note: The ABVP that he refers to stands for the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, an extremist Hindu youth group.
MD
******************
Dear All,
We want to bring it to your notice the constant physical and psychological violence that many of us Muslim students have been experiencing at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi over the last two years. Recently on On 17th March a Muslim student Masihullah Khan [ M.A. French] was brutally assaulted by a group of ABVP/RSS students inside Lohit hostel in full view of the Senior Waden and fellow residents. Despite that the administration did not deem it be a serious offence and let them off with very mild punishments, which were then revoked. All that was left of the punishment was hostel transfers, and even those were not carried out.
Exactly a month later on 17th April the same group of students assaulted me [Idrees Kanth] badly and further threatened me of dire consequences. Even after this, the administration on one ground or other ['humanitarian considerations' is what the administration said] has been protecting them making us feel not only very vulnerable but traumatised. Such an attitude of the administration has only emboldened these hooligans who are now openly targeting us.
It is a common knowledge among students in JNU that the administration is completely right wing. In the past if by any chance a Dalit or a Muslim student was involved even in a minor act of indiscipline, the student was severely punished and even rusticated.
We therefore, appeal to you all to build an opinion on such a stark and open communal policy of the JNU administration and the growing communal violence on the campus. We are being constantly threatened, intimidated, abused, physically beaten etc etc. We feel completely helpless !!!
Thanks,
Idrees Kanth
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Children Burned to Death by Rwandan Hutu Militia in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo
The FDLR came and circled my house. When we tried to leave, they said, “You can’t leave or we’ll kill you.” I was able to move out a bit and get some distance from the house, but my three young boys were still inside, sleeping on a single bed. Then I saw the FDLR combatants light a fire directly on my house and my three boys burned to death.
-Father of three young boys (ages 3, 4, and 6) burned to death in their home:
-Father of three young boys (ages 3, 4, and 6) burned to death in their home:
According to Human Rights Watch, on the night of April 17, 2009, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR, a Rwandan Hutu militia) attacked Luofu and Kasiki villages in the southern Lubero territory of North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. As a result of the attack at least seven civilians, including five young children, were killed, the latter burned to death in their homes.
Though the FDLR had warned earlier that Luofu would be attacked, according the Human Rights Watch, neither the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUC) nor the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) took any precautionary measures to protect civilians in case the threat was carried out.
Photos and first-hand accounts of the attack can be read here.
“Bring me my bow of burning gold...”
As Paris fully entered exuberant springtime the other day, the novia and I found ourselves strolling down the Champs-Élysées. Losing ourselves in the crowds of tourists, we walked following an hour spent perusing a retrospective of the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake at the Musée des Beaux-Arts of the Petit Palais that was most impressive indeed.Blake has been among my favorite poets ever since my midteens, when I read two volumes of his poetry, Songs of Innocence and of Experience and the prophetic/mystic book-length poem Jerusalem, in a volume of his collected works. Subject to auditory and visual visions (some would say hallucinations) since his youth, Blake’s poetry was intensely mystical in its yearning for a melding of the corporeal and incorporeal worlds, perhaps somewhat akin to the poetry of the great Persian mystic bard Rumi in its search for the divine among the everyday. Though the work of John Milton, particularly given its context in the midst of England’s civil war, perhaps had a greater emotional impact on me over the years, the intensity of Blake’s religious/mystical vision has always stuck with me. Blake’s vision was powerful enough through the years to inspire the poet Allen Ginsberg, who had a 1948 auditory hallucination of Blake reading his poem "Ah, Sunflower" in a Harlem apartment, to a new dedication to his own writing.
Seeing for the first-time the exquisitely wrought illuminated manuscripts that Blake etched to illustrate his own books of poetry (which he could barely give away during his lifetime) was a powerful lesson in staying true to one’s vision, no matter how incongruous or unpopular it might seem to one’s contemporaries. Likewise, such Blake illustrations as that of a heroically put-upon Job and a series of extraordinary illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy make for a moving and more than a little disturbing experience in a Paris museum on a blazing spring day. But one well worth the time to meditate over its impact.
The Blake retrospective runs at the Petit Palais until June 28th.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Of pirates and protectors
Despite the understandable joy at the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from the clutches of a quartet of bandits who had seized his ship off the coast of Somalia, and the refrain of the "three shots/three kills" action of United States Navy snipers in rescuing him (killing three of his four captors), something seems to me to have been lost in all the euphoria.
Somalia has been without a functioning government since the 1991 overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Under the auspices of United Nations Security Council Resolution 794, which created the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), a U.S.-led United Nations force operated in Somalia between December 1992 and March 1995, but failed to stem the tide of warlordism and famine which, along with a potent dose of Islamic fundamentalism, continues to underline much of the violence in the country today. The citizens of Somalia have been enduring unrelenting agony and conflict for 18 years, yet only now does the world media take notice, mentioning the piracy phenomenon without delving into the more complicated geopolitical reality of the region and possible prescriptive remedies. Violence in Africa is once again largely portrayed as if it just appeared out of nowhere, and as if the suffering of the Somalis should only serve as background for the economic angle of the piracy story.
In acknowledging this more complicated reality, in addition to pointing readers towards the work of the great Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, I would ask that they read the below essay by Mogadishu-born K'naan, a Somali-Canadian musician of whose work I am quite fond. Though I cannot attest to the veracity of every example that K'naan lays out in support of his case, I think that these words are nonetheless an important perspective on a troubled region that Europe and North America have only recently seemed to have taken notice of.
MD
************************************************
Why We Don't Condemn Our Pirates
by K'naan
(The original post can be read here)
Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Outside of sea bandits, and young girls fantasizing of Johnny Depp, would anyone with an honest regard for good human conduct really say that they are in support of Sea Robbery?
Well, in Somalia, the answer is: it's complicated.
The news media these days has been covering piracy in the Somali coast with such lop-sided journalism, that it's lucky they're not on a ship themselves. It's true that the constant hijacking of vessels in the Gulf of Aden is a major threat to the vibrant trade route between Asia and Europe. It is also true that for most of the pirates operating in this vast shoreline, money is the primary objective.
But according to so many Somalis, the disruption of Europe's darling of a trade route, is just Karma biting a perpetrator in the butt. And if you don't believe in Karma, maybe you believe in recent history. Here is why we Somalis find ourselves slightly shy of condemning our pirates.
Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And although its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, sprung from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.
After the overthrow of Siyad Barre, our charmless dictator of twenty-some-odd years, two major forces of the Hawiye Clan came to power. At the time, Ali Mahdi, and General Mohamed Farah Aidid, the two leaders of the Hawiye rebels, were largely considered liberators. But the unity of the two men and their respective sub-clans was very short-lived. It's as if they were dumbstruck at the advent of ousting the dictator, or that they just forgot to discuss who will be the leader of the country once they defeated their common foe.
A disagreement of who will upgrade from militia leader to Mr. President broke up their honeymoon. It's because of this disagreement that we've seen one of the most decomposing wars in Somalia's history, leading to millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead.
But war is expensive and militias need food for their families, and Jaad (an amphetamine-based stimulant) to stay awake for the fighting. Therefore, a good clan -based Warlord must look out for his own fighters. Aidid's men turned to robbing aid trucks carrying food to the starving masses, and re-selling it to continue their war. But Ali Mahdi had his sights set on a larger and more unexploited resource, namely: the Indian Ocean.
Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.
But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Progresso, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.
In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including "Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, Cadmium, Mercury and chemical waste."
But this wasn't just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia's aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation's death trap.
Now Somalia has upped the world's pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Blackwater and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in. But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters. The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.
It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice.
As is apparent these days, one man's pirate is another man's coast guard.
Somalia has been without a functioning government since the 1991 overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Under the auspices of United Nations Security Council Resolution 794, which created the Unified Task Force (UNITAF), a U.S.-led United Nations force operated in Somalia between December 1992 and March 1995, but failed to stem the tide of warlordism and famine which, along with a potent dose of Islamic fundamentalism, continues to underline much of the violence in the country today. The citizens of Somalia have been enduring unrelenting agony and conflict for 18 years, yet only now does the world media take notice, mentioning the piracy phenomenon without delving into the more complicated geopolitical reality of the region and possible prescriptive remedies. Violence in Africa is once again largely portrayed as if it just appeared out of nowhere, and as if the suffering of the Somalis should only serve as background for the economic angle of the piracy story.
In acknowledging this more complicated reality, in addition to pointing readers towards the work of the great Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah, I would ask that they read the below essay by Mogadishu-born K'naan, a Somali-Canadian musician of whose work I am quite fond. Though I cannot attest to the veracity of every example that K'naan lays out in support of his case, I think that these words are nonetheless an important perspective on a troubled region that Europe and North America have only recently seemed to have taken notice of.
MD
************************************************
Why We Don't Condemn Our Pirates
by K'naan
(The original post can be read here)
Can anyone ever really be for piracy? Outside of sea bandits, and young girls fantasizing of Johnny Depp, would anyone with an honest regard for good human conduct really say that they are in support of Sea Robbery?
Well, in Somalia, the answer is: it's complicated.
The news media these days has been covering piracy in the Somali coast with such lop-sided journalism, that it's lucky they're not on a ship themselves. It's true that the constant hijacking of vessels in the Gulf of Aden is a major threat to the vibrant trade route between Asia and Europe. It is also true that for most of the pirates operating in this vast shoreline, money is the primary objective.
But according to so many Somalis, the disruption of Europe's darling of a trade route, is just Karma biting a perpetrator in the butt. And if you don't believe in Karma, maybe you believe in recent history. Here is why we Somalis find ourselves slightly shy of condemning our pirates.
Somalia has been without any form of a functioning government since 1991. And although its failures, like many other toddler governments in Africa, sprung from the wells of post-colonial independence, bad governance and development loan sharks, the specific problem of piracy was put in motion in 1992.
After the overthrow of Siyad Barre, our charmless dictator of twenty-some-odd years, two major forces of the Hawiye Clan came to power. At the time, Ali Mahdi, and General Mohamed Farah Aidid, the two leaders of the Hawiye rebels, were largely considered liberators. But the unity of the two men and their respective sub-clans was very short-lived. It's as if they were dumbstruck at the advent of ousting the dictator, or that they just forgot to discuss who will be the leader of the country once they defeated their common foe.
A disagreement of who will upgrade from militia leader to Mr. President broke up their honeymoon. It's because of this disagreement that we've seen one of the most decomposing wars in Somalia's history, leading to millions displaced and hundreds of thousands dead.
But war is expensive and militias need food for their families, and Jaad (an amphetamine-based stimulant) to stay awake for the fighting. Therefore, a good clan -based Warlord must look out for his own fighters. Aidid's men turned to robbing aid trucks carrying food to the starving masses, and re-selling it to continue their war. But Ali Mahdi had his sights set on a larger and more unexploited resource, namely: the Indian Ocean.
Already by this time, local fishermen in the coastline of Somalia have been complaining of illegal vessels coming to Somali waters and stealing all the fish. And since there was no government to report it to, and since the severity of the violence clumsily overshadowed every other problem, the fishermen went completely unheard.
But it was around this same time that a more sinister, a more patronizing practice was being put in motion. A Swiss firm called Achair Parterns, and an Italian waste company called Progresso, made a deal with Ali Mahdi, that they were to dump containers of waste material in Somali waters. These European companies were said to be paying Warlords about $3 a ton, whereas to properly dispose of waste in Europe costs about $1000 a ton.
In 2004, after a tsunami washed ashore several leaking containers, thousand of locals in the Puntland region of Somalia started to complain of severe and previously unreported ailments, such as abdominal bleeding, skin melting off and a lot of immediate cancer-like symptoms. Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environmental Program, says that the containers had many different kinds of waste, including "Uranium, radioactive waste, lead, Cadmium, Mercury and chemical waste."
But this wasn't just a passing evil from one or two groups taking advantage of our unprotected waters. The UN envoy for Somalia, Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, says that the practice still continues to this day. It was months after those initial reports that local fishermen mobilized themselves, along with street militias, to go into the waters and deter the Westerners from having a free pass at completely destroying Somalia's aquatic life. Now years later, the deterring has become less noble, and the ex-fishermen with their militias have begun to develop a taste for ransom at sea. This form of piracy is now a major contributor to the Somali economy, especially in the very region that private toxic waste companies first began to burry our nation's death trap.
Now Somalia has upped the world's pirate attacks by over 21 percent in one year, and while NATO and the EU are both sending forces to the Somali coast to try and slow down the attacks, Blackwater and all kinds of private security firms are intent on cashing in. But while Europeans are well in their right to protect their trade interest in the region, our pirates were the only deterrent we had from an externally imposed environmental disaster. No one can say for sure that some of the ships they are now holding for ransom were not involved in illegal activity in our waters. The truth is, if you ask any Somali, if getting rid of the pirates only means the continuous rape of our coast by unmonitored Western Vessels, and the producing of a new cancerous generation, we would all fly our pirate flags high.
It is time that the world gave the Somali people some assurance that these Western illegal activities will end, if our pirates are to seize their operations. We do not want the EU and NATO serving as a shield for these nuclear waste-dumping hoodlums. It seems to me that this new modern crisis is truly a question of justice, but also a question of whose justice.
As is apparent these days, one man's pirate is another man's coast guard.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Michael Deibert named Senior Fellow World Policy Institute
In a good development all around, I have been named a Senior Fellow at New York's World Policy Institute, which develops and champions innovative policies that require a progressive and global point of view. Having previously written for the Institute's flagship publication, the World Policy Journal, from Indian-controlled Kashmir, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guatemala, it is my hope that, with the Institute's resources behind me, I will be able to continue to be of use, through reporting and speaking engagements, in the struggle of economically and socially disadvantaged people to lead more just and decent lives.
A nice start to 2009.
A nice start to 2009.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
Brave New World
Every week seems to bring another herald of the impending demise of reporting as we know it. Last week, the New York Times Company threatened to shut the Boston Globe unless the newspaper's unions agreed to $20 million in concessions. And in my home town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, the Intelligencer Journal (founded in 1794, making it the 7th oldest newspaper in the United States) and the Lancaster New Era (first printed in 1796) have announced that they will begin publishing a single morning edition starting June 29.
Though the papers share a corporate owner and a newsroom, they have historically maintained relatively distinct editorial voices, with the Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster's morning paper) maintaining a relatively liberal line while the Lancaster New Era was often frothingly conservative. In addition to depriving readers of a diversity of viewpoints and thoroughgoing news coverage of Lancaster County, the move will also result in the layoffs of dozens of employees at both papers. Ironically, the Lancaster New Era was my first taste of newsroom journalism when I spent a day there when I was something in the neighborhood of 14 years old during a middle school career day.
The challenges such an ever-contracting news environment present to independent journalists such as myself, many of whom live hand-to-mouth on a razor thin profit margin that separates solvency from destitution (as I do), are substantial and ongoing. With the news business, particularly in the United States, on life-support, journalists need to be ever more dogged and creative in the means by which they are able to continue doing the kind of in-depth, on-the-ground reporting that someone blogging behind a desk is unable to do. But that process itself - applying for grants and looking towards non-traditional avenues of publication - is also often a stark reminder of the relative disposability and vulnerability of the position of reporters in this current environment.
A case study from my own experience.
During the process of applying for a grant with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a project in Afghanistan, I received an email from Jon Sawyer, the Center's Director, telling me that the Pulitzer Center had recently struck an agreement with GlobalPost.com under which Pulitzer Center grantees agreed to write at least one short piece (600-800 words) suitable for use on the website. Sawyer went on to write that these stories would then be featured on GlobalPost - a for-profit venture founded by Philip Balboni and Charles Sennot - and afterwards made available for purchase/republication by Global Post subscribers. After Global Post used the article on their own website (for free), the “re-use” fee, if the articles were indeed re-sold, would net Pulitzer Center grantees the princely sum of $200 per use.
Asked if I would be amenable to filing a story/photo for GlobalPost, I responded that I would be more than happy to write for the website as long as they paid upon publication, as is the norm, not upon re-sale. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sawyer’s enthusiasm for the Afghanistan project, which he had previously spoke of in the most eager terms, cooled tremendously, and no grant was in the end dispersed.
Perhaps I should not read too much into the incident, but I found this episode troubling in what it suggested, which was a surreptitious compromising of the Pulitzer Center’s publicly-stated position of providing "travel grants to cover hard costs associated with upcoming travel for an international reporting project” in support of a for-profit enterprise. Writing to GlobalPost about this, I received a prompt though rather self-important response from Rick Byrne, GlobalPost’s Director of Communications & Marketing. It stated, in part:
GlobalPost didn’t need the work of Pulitzer Center journalists to fulfill its editorial budget, but we wanted to provide them an opportunity for additional compensation in addition to the exposure.
But of course, GlobalPost, which describes itself as “relying on the enduring values of great journalism: integrity, accuracy, independence and powerful storytelling,” is not exactly turning down the free labour of journalists to provide itself with content either, is it?
So, what are committed independent journalists to do? How does one feed oneself and care for one’s family in such an environment? I have never for a moment doubted the value of principled, investigative independent reporting that exposed often-ignored truths and challenged the powerful in their positions in privilege, whether it be in Haiti, Congo, Australia or Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Far from saving this kind of reporting, though, my fear is that entities such as GlobalPost, which seek to replace the actual jobs once offered by newspapers with networks of underpaid, overworked freelancers lacking in such perks as health insurance, may in fact help hasten its demise.
We as journalists are now piloting a fragile ship through stormy seas, and I hope that we can make it to the far shore. Do my fellows journos - or others - have any thoughts on the matter?
Though the papers share a corporate owner and a newsroom, they have historically maintained relatively distinct editorial voices, with the Intelligencer Journal (Lancaster's morning paper) maintaining a relatively liberal line while the Lancaster New Era was often frothingly conservative. In addition to depriving readers of a diversity of viewpoints and thoroughgoing news coverage of Lancaster County, the move will also result in the layoffs of dozens of employees at both papers. Ironically, the Lancaster New Era was my first taste of newsroom journalism when I spent a day there when I was something in the neighborhood of 14 years old during a middle school career day.
The challenges such an ever-contracting news environment present to independent journalists such as myself, many of whom live hand-to-mouth on a razor thin profit margin that separates solvency from destitution (as I do), are substantial and ongoing. With the news business, particularly in the United States, on life-support, journalists need to be ever more dogged and creative in the means by which they are able to continue doing the kind of in-depth, on-the-ground reporting that someone blogging behind a desk is unable to do. But that process itself - applying for grants and looking towards non-traditional avenues of publication - is also often a stark reminder of the relative disposability and vulnerability of the position of reporters in this current environment.
A case study from my own experience.
During the process of applying for a grant with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for a project in Afghanistan, I received an email from Jon Sawyer, the Center's Director, telling me that the Pulitzer Center had recently struck an agreement with GlobalPost.com under which Pulitzer Center grantees agreed to write at least one short piece (600-800 words) suitable for use on the website. Sawyer went on to write that these stories would then be featured on GlobalPost - a for-profit venture founded by Philip Balboni and Charles Sennot - and afterwards made available for purchase/republication by Global Post subscribers. After Global Post used the article on their own website (for free), the “re-use” fee, if the articles were indeed re-sold, would net Pulitzer Center grantees the princely sum of $200 per use.
Asked if I would be amenable to filing a story/photo for GlobalPost, I responded that I would be more than happy to write for the website as long as they paid upon publication, as is the norm, not upon re-sale. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sawyer’s enthusiasm for the Afghanistan project, which he had previously spoke of in the most eager terms, cooled tremendously, and no grant was in the end dispersed.
Perhaps I should not read too much into the incident, but I found this episode troubling in what it suggested, which was a surreptitious compromising of the Pulitzer Center’s publicly-stated position of providing "travel grants to cover hard costs associated with upcoming travel for an international reporting project” in support of a for-profit enterprise. Writing to GlobalPost about this, I received a prompt though rather self-important response from Rick Byrne, GlobalPost’s Director of Communications & Marketing. It stated, in part:
GlobalPost didn’t need the work of Pulitzer Center journalists to fulfill its editorial budget, but we wanted to provide them an opportunity for additional compensation in addition to the exposure.
But of course, GlobalPost, which describes itself as “relying on the enduring values of great journalism: integrity, accuracy, independence and powerful storytelling,” is not exactly turning down the free labour of journalists to provide itself with content either, is it?
So, what are committed independent journalists to do? How does one feed oneself and care for one’s family in such an environment? I have never for a moment doubted the value of principled, investigative independent reporting that exposed often-ignored truths and challenged the powerful in their positions in privilege, whether it be in Haiti, Congo, Australia or Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Far from saving this kind of reporting, though, my fear is that entities such as GlobalPost, which seek to replace the actual jobs once offered by newspapers with networks of underpaid, overworked freelancers lacking in such perks as health insurance, may in fact help hasten its demise.
We as journalists are now piloting a fragile ship through stormy seas, and I hope that we can make it to the far shore. Do my fellows journos - or others - have any thoughts on the matter?
Saturday, April 04, 2009
Bienvenue à la ceinture rouge
Paris in the springtime, and it’s very sweet to be back, I must say.
Returning to the heart of Europe from four months in Australia, probably the most unpleasant country I have ever visited, France, with its glittering intellectual tradition, culinary excellence, potpourri of cultures and proximity to so many areas of the world that hold my interest, has proved a very easy transition.
Continuing my tradition of living in largely immigrant areas of the city (as befits my immigrant status), I have swapped my pied-à-terre in the 18eme’s Château-Rouge quarter for a charming and light-filled flat just across the périphérie along the frontier of two neighborhoods, Les Lilas and Bagnolet, in the neuf trois department of Seine-Saint-Denis. A historically working-class area that is now one of the most fertile grounds for French hip-hop, the area of northeastern Paris that I now call home has such a strong tradition of militant labour activism that it once gained the sobriquet la ceinture rouge (“the red belt”), a name that still holds largely true today. Far from the overpriced tourist destinations and grand boulevards of western Paris, the neuf trois is France’s immigrant experience at its most authentic and, as such, one of the most vibrant places to experience the real culture and development of the language that France has to offer.
Much has happened during my travels, including the declassification of documents that prove that the United States government knew that Guatemalan political actors it supported with arms and cash during that country’s 36-year civil war were behind the disappearance of thousands of people. The disclosure, largely due to the important work of the Nation Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, DC, sheds fresh light on the development of a deeply corrupt political culture that continues to bedevil Guatemala today (as I found out during a recent trip there) and my own country’s role in it.
In terms of America’s current history, I can’t speak highly enough of the deep satisfaction I have felt to watch Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as president. I can’t remember the last time I heard a US president rhapsodize about the sublime please of sipping wine in a European cafe as the sun goes down, all while giving an eloquent defense of public service, but I am glad that I was able to be alive at the time Obama was president. He makes one as inspired and hopeful about the possibilities of politics and America’s role in the world as the previous president made one hopeless and cynical.
I should have some much bigger news coming in the next few days. In the meantime, on y va.
Returning to the heart of Europe from four months in Australia, probably the most unpleasant country I have ever visited, France, with its glittering intellectual tradition, culinary excellence, potpourri of cultures and proximity to so many areas of the world that hold my interest, has proved a very easy transition.
Continuing my tradition of living in largely immigrant areas of the city (as befits my immigrant status), I have swapped my pied-à-terre in the 18eme’s Château-Rouge quarter for a charming and light-filled flat just across the périphérie along the frontier of two neighborhoods, Les Lilas and Bagnolet, in the neuf trois department of Seine-Saint-Denis. A historically working-class area that is now one of the most fertile grounds for French hip-hop, the area of northeastern Paris that I now call home has such a strong tradition of militant labour activism that it once gained the sobriquet la ceinture rouge (“the red belt”), a name that still holds largely true today. Far from the overpriced tourist destinations and grand boulevards of western Paris, the neuf trois is France’s immigrant experience at its most authentic and, as such, one of the most vibrant places to experience the real culture and development of the language that France has to offer.
Much has happened during my travels, including the declassification of documents that prove that the United States government knew that Guatemalan political actors it supported with arms and cash during that country’s 36-year civil war were behind the disappearance of thousands of people. The disclosure, largely due to the important work of the Nation Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington, DC, sheds fresh light on the development of a deeply corrupt political culture that continues to bedevil Guatemala today (as I found out during a recent trip there) and my own country’s role in it.
In terms of America’s current history, I can’t speak highly enough of the deep satisfaction I have felt to watch Barack Obama on his first visit to Europe as president. I can’t remember the last time I heard a US president rhapsodize about the sublime please of sipping wine in a European cafe as the sun goes down, all while giving an eloquent defense of public service, but I am glad that I was able to be alive at the time Obama was president. He makes one as inspired and hopeful about the possibilities of politics and America’s role in the world as the previous president made one hopeless and cynical.
I should have some much bigger news coming in the next few days. In the meantime, on y va.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape
Michael Deibert: Australia’s Parched Landscape
February 26th, 2009
(This posting originally appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal, and can be read in its original form here)
When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.
Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.
The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.
Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming.
What has the Australian government’s response been to this growing disaster? Not much, it appears.
Though a 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030 “water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia,” and recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, Australian environmentalists were outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.
The Rudd government conditioned cuts beyond that level to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition.
Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers, and $157 million to cement makers. Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa, and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system.
With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the thirty-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country’s intensive use of coal.
Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.
With the European Union having recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020, one must hope that Australia’s environmental lobby will succeed in pressuring the Rudd government to adopt a more aggressive approach to combating Australia’s contribution to climate change, and to help move to heal the continent’s already-ravaged environment.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last wrote for the World Policy Journal from Guatemala.
February 26th, 2009
(This posting originally appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal, and can be read in its original form here)
When Australia was ravaged by wildfires that killed over 200 people earlier this month, the acts of arson that police suspect were behind at least some of the blazes were made even worse by the decade-long dry spell the country has been enduring.
Though this heavily eroded and sparsely populated continent has experienced two other major droughts over the last century, both the intensity and duration of the current lack of rainfall has scientists worried that the country’s environment may be permanently shifting to a drier regime.
The Murray-Darling Basin—a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia’s land mass—has been particularly hard hit, with official figures showing that, from 2006 until 2007, the amount of water flow into the basin was just 1,000 gigaliters. Normal inflows into the basin previously measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters. The region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum—a figure based on 117 years of records. Helping to irrigate such states such as Victoria, the site of the worst wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.
Across southern Australia, scientists have also witnessed an intensification of the subtropical ridge phenomenon, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked to global warming.
What has the Australian government’s response been to this growing disaster? Not much, it appears.
Though a 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030 “water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia,” and recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, Australian environmentalists were outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.
The Rudd government conditioned cuts beyond that level to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition.
Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers, and $157 million to cement makers. Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa, and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system.
With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the thirty-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country’s intensive use of coal.
Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.
With the European Union having recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020, one must hope that Australia’s environmental lobby will succeed in pressuring the Rudd government to adopt a more aggressive approach to combating Australia’s contribution to climate change, and to help move to heal the continent’s already-ravaged environment.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last wrote for the World Policy Journal from Guatemala.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Bone dry to blazing in Australia
Friday, February 20, 2009
Bone dry to blazing in Australia
By Michael Deibert
The Washington Times
(Read the original article here)
SYDNEY, Australia
The combination of Australia's worst-ever wildfires at a time when the nation is suffering its worst drought on record has fueled an intense debate on the effects of climate change in this vast and sparsely populated continent.
Officials say that at least some of the fires, which have killed more than 200 people, were the result of arson. But the fires were made worse by a decade-long dry spell, which has outstripped previous droughts going back at least a century.
Far from being a temporary lack of rainfall, it is a phenomenon that has observers worried that Australia might be witnessing a permanent altering of its environment, with the Murray-Darling Basin - a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia's land mass - being particularly hard hit.
"While rainfall might be about the same as during the previous two droughts, the inflows into the river system are much lower, and a fair bit of the cause of that is linked to global warming," said Wendy Craik, chief executive for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.
The commission has existed in some form or another for most of the past hundred years.
"There has been quite a shift in autumn rainfall," Ms. Craik said. "Before, it would wet the catchment, and when it rained in winter, we would get runoff into the system. Now, when you do get rain, it just sucks into a very dry catchment and you don't get the runoff."
As an inter-jurisdictional venture between four states, the region of Australia's capital, Canberra, and the federal government, figures collected by the commission in recent years have proved especially alarming.
Helping to water such states such as Victoria, the site of the wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the Murray-Darling Basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.
Once fertile scrubland has become cracked and arid desert.
Commission figures show that the region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum - a figure based on 117 years of records.
Whereas the normal inflows have measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year, from 2006 until 2007 the amount was just 1,000 gigaliters. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters.
Last year, the state of South Australia, the country's driest, was forced to purchase water from other states for the first time in its history to ensure that it would have enough water to meets its basic needs.
Late last year, the federal government announced it was assuming full control of the commission for the first time in the body's history.
Beyond the crop-growing regions of southern Australia, the effects of the drought have been felt as far north as the coastal city of Brisbane, hundreds of miles away, with residents forbidden from watering lawns, washing cars or using water for many other activities without a government permit.
"Extended periods of lack of rainfall have occurred in the past, but the difference we are seeing with this drought is that the impacts on hydrology seem to be much more severe than what we experienced before," said Ian Smith, coordinator of the South East Australia Climate Initiative with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency.
"The temperatures are warmer and that has exacerbated the effect on runoff into dams and rivers," Mr. Smith said. "The [low] inflows into the system are unprecedented, and that's the thing that we're worried about."
In southern Australia there has been an intensification of the phenomenon known as the subtropical ridge, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked by many scientists to global warming.
The debate about the drought also has a political dimension.
A 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, "water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia." The report recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Australian environmentalists were subsequently outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.
Cuts beyond that level were tied to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition
By contrast, the European Union recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.
A December Australian government white paper struck a cautious tone on the issue of climate change, saying that the country's most emissions-intensive industries would be given "assistance in as practical and effective a fashion as possible," but that the government would "explicitly support" the continued growth of such industries.
Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers and $157 million to cement makers.
Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system, the investment firm says.
With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the 30-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country's intensive use of coal.
Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.
Many Australians fear that their country may be heading toward a largely rainless future.
"There is massive stress, uncertainly and fear," said Mike Young, executive director of the Water Economics and Management program at the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute in South Australia. "There is a difference between a drought and what we're experiencing, which looks like a shift to a drier regime."
"We're in uncharted policy territory, and we're dealing with things with which we've had no previous experience," he said.
Bone dry to blazing in Australia
By Michael Deibert
The Washington Times
(Read the original article here)
SYDNEY, Australia
The combination of Australia's worst-ever wildfires at a time when the nation is suffering its worst drought on record has fueled an intense debate on the effects of climate change in this vast and sparsely populated continent.
Officials say that at least some of the fires, which have killed more than 200 people, were the result of arson. But the fires were made worse by a decade-long dry spell, which has outstripped previous droughts going back at least a century.
Far from being a temporary lack of rainfall, it is a phenomenon that has observers worried that Australia might be witnessing a permanent altering of its environment, with the Murray-Darling Basin - a river system in the southeast that drains one-seventh of Australia's land mass - being particularly hard hit.
"While rainfall might be about the same as during the previous two droughts, the inflows into the river system are much lower, and a fair bit of the cause of that is linked to global warming," said Wendy Craik, chief executive for the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.
The commission has existed in some form or another for most of the past hundred years.
"There has been quite a shift in autumn rainfall," Ms. Craik said. "Before, it would wet the catchment, and when it rained in winter, we would get runoff into the system. Now, when you do get rain, it just sucks into a very dry catchment and you don't get the runoff."
As an inter-jurisdictional venture between four states, the region of Australia's capital, Canberra, and the federal government, figures collected by the commission in recent years have proved especially alarming.
Helping to water such states such as Victoria, the site of the wildfires, as well as New South Wales and Queensland, the Murray-Darling Basin was once wet enough to irrigate crops that produced 1.2 million metric tons of rice. Last year, the rice harvest fell to 18,000 metric tons.
Once fertile scrubland has become cracked and arid desert.
Commission figures show that the region had record low inflows of water between 2006 and 2008, with the inflows for 2006-2007 less than 60 percent of the previous minimum - a figure based on 117 years of records.
Whereas the normal inflows have measured about 10,000 gigaliters a year, from 2006 until 2007 the amount was just 1,000 gigaliters. From 2007 until 2008 it improved marginally to a still-meager 3,000 gigaliters.
Last year, the state of South Australia, the country's driest, was forced to purchase water from other states for the first time in its history to ensure that it would have enough water to meets its basic needs.
Late last year, the federal government announced it was assuming full control of the commission for the first time in the body's history.
Beyond the crop-growing regions of southern Australia, the effects of the drought have been felt as far north as the coastal city of Brisbane, hundreds of miles away, with residents forbidden from watering lawns, washing cars or using water for many other activities without a government permit.
"Extended periods of lack of rainfall have occurred in the past, but the difference we are seeing with this drought is that the impacts on hydrology seem to be much more severe than what we experienced before," said Ian Smith, coordinator of the South East Australia Climate Initiative with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency.
"The temperatures are warmer and that has exacerbated the effect on runoff into dams and rivers," Mr. Smith said. "The [low] inflows into the system are unprecedented, and that's the thing that we're worried about."
In southern Australia there has been an intensification of the phenomenon known as the subtropical ridge, a swath of high pressure characterized by a reduction in the amount of rainfall in autumn and late winter. The expansion of the ridge has been closely linked by many scientists to global warming.
The debate about the drought also has a political dimension.
A 2007 report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that by 2030, "water security problems are projected to intensify in southern and eastern Australia." The report recommended a worldwide reduction in carbon emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Australian environmentalists were subsequently outraged when the Labor Party government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd proposed a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) that included a far more modest cut of 5 percent to 15 percent by 2020.
Cuts beyond that level were tied to government demands for a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as well as exemptions for energy-intensive industries in a broad carbon trading arrangement. Compensation for electricity producers and users was also an attached condition
By contrast, the European Union recently adopted a goal of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2020.
A December Australian government white paper struck a cautious tone on the issue of climate change, saying that the country's most emissions-intensive industries would be given "assistance in as practical and effective a fashion as possible," but that the government would "explicitly support" the continued growth of such industries.
Subsequent research by Innovest Strategic Value Advisors, an investment advisory firm, estimated that in the first year of the CPRS, $939 million of aid would go to the aluminum smelting industry, $297 million to petroleum refiners, $261 million to steel makers, $182 million to natural gas producers and $157 million to cement makers.
Companies such as Rio Tinto, Alcoa and Woodside stand to profit in the hundreds of millions of dollars from the system, the investment firm says.
With a relatively small population of slightly more than 20 million for a land mass nearly as large as the United States, Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse emission rates in the 30-member Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), chiefly due to the country's intensive use of coal.
Australia emits 28.1 tons of carbon per person into the atmosphere, five times greater than the per person total for China.
Many Australians fear that their country may be heading toward a largely rainless future.
"There is massive stress, uncertainly and fear," said Mike Young, executive director of the Water Economics and Management program at the University of Adelaide's Environment Institute in South Australia. "There is a difference between a drought and what we're experiencing, which looks like a shift to a drier regime."
"We're in uncharted policy territory, and we're dealing with things with which we've had no previous experience," he said.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant
Xstrata Dreaming: The Struggle of Aboriginal Australians against a Swiss Mining Giant
by Michael Deibert, Special to CorpWatch
February 16th, 2009
The McArthur River winds through Australia's remote Northern Territory creating lush floodplains that sustain vast herds of kangaroos, wallabies and cattle. Above them, finches, wild turkeys, and flocks of migratory birds fill an endless sky. The area around the river, which runs 300 kilometers before emptying into the Gulf of Carpentaria, also provides spiritual sustenance to the region's four main Aboriginal linguistic groups: the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.
Australia's indigenous culture is among the oldest continuously existing communities in the world, and one whose spiritual cosmology, known as the Dreamtime, ties its members closely to the land of their ancestors. At once a mythical time of creation and a present-day spiritual cycle, the Dreamtime includes such totemic animals as the Rainbow Snake, the Turtle and the Alligator. Rituals in tribute to these symbolic guides and protectors must be performed at certain times and in specific places around the expanse of this immense but sparsely populated continent.
Despite the region's glaring lack of basic services, education and employment opportunities, Aboriginal residents value the McArthur River area for its spiritual wealth. But a multinational mining company's pursuit of material riches threatens the core of this already beleaguered culture. In the 1950s, Mount Isa Mines (MIM), a mining concern based in neighboring Queensland state, discovered vast lead, silver and zinc deposits beneath and around the river, and conducted extensive exploratory drilling and feasibility studies.
The Yanyuwa had lived in the region for millennia and were able to legally claim the land in 1977 under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which allows indigenous people to establish ownership of land based on traditional occupation. Nonetheless, MIM, which by then had been operating in the area for three decades, began underground mining activities along the river in 1995.
In 2003, the government of the Northern Territory approved MIM's application to transition from underground to above-ground ("open-cut") mining, a process involving the diversion of the McArthur River. A short time later, MIM sold its operations to Switzerland-based Xstrata Plc, Europe's largest zinc producer. Described on the company's website as "a global diversified mining group" with a "meaningful position in seven major international commodity markets: copper, coking coal, thermal coal, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium, and zinc," Xstrata has operations that span 18 countries.
Now, as full owners of McArthur River Mining Pty Ltd, Xstrata is authorized to extract 43 million tons of the resource over the next 20 years.
Read the full article here.
by Michael Deibert, Special to CorpWatch
February 16th, 2009
The McArthur River winds through Australia's remote Northern Territory creating lush floodplains that sustain vast herds of kangaroos, wallabies and cattle. Above them, finches, wild turkeys, and flocks of migratory birds fill an endless sky. The area around the river, which runs 300 kilometers before emptying into the Gulf of Carpentaria, also provides spiritual sustenance to the region's four main Aboriginal linguistic groups: the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.
Australia's indigenous culture is among the oldest continuously existing communities in the world, and one whose spiritual cosmology, known as the Dreamtime, ties its members closely to the land of their ancestors. At once a mythical time of creation and a present-day spiritual cycle, the Dreamtime includes such totemic animals as the Rainbow Snake, the Turtle and the Alligator. Rituals in tribute to these symbolic guides and protectors must be performed at certain times and in specific places around the expanse of this immense but sparsely populated continent.
Despite the region's glaring lack of basic services, education and employment opportunities, Aboriginal residents value the McArthur River area for its spiritual wealth. But a multinational mining company's pursuit of material riches threatens the core of this already beleaguered culture. In the 1950s, Mount Isa Mines (MIM), a mining concern based in neighboring Queensland state, discovered vast lead, silver and zinc deposits beneath and around the river, and conducted extensive exploratory drilling and feasibility studies.
The Yanyuwa had lived in the region for millennia and were able to legally claim the land in 1977 under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, which allows indigenous people to establish ownership of land based on traditional occupation. Nonetheless, MIM, which by then had been operating in the area for three decades, began underground mining activities along the river in 1995.
In 2003, the government of the Northern Territory approved MIM's application to transition from underground to above-ground ("open-cut") mining, a process involving the diversion of the McArthur River. A short time later, MIM sold its operations to Switzerland-based Xstrata Plc, Europe's largest zinc producer. Described on the company's website as "a global diversified mining group" with a "meaningful position in seven major international commodity markets: copper, coking coal, thermal coal, ferrochrome, nickel, vanadium, and zinc," Xstrata has operations that span 18 countries.
Now, as full owners of McArthur River Mining Pty Ltd, Xstrata is authorized to extract 43 million tons of the resource over the next 20 years.
Read the full article here.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Michael Deibert: Echoes of Obama on Australia Day
Michael Deibert: Echoes of Obama on Australia Day
(This article first appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal and can be read here)
There we were, at a community meeting of indigenous Australians in the remote Northern Territory town of Borroloola, where dispersed communities of this frontier province come together only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Representatives of the region’s four main linguistic groups—the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa, and Mara—were all here, discussing with a government minister and with one another the impact of a local mine that had, without consultation with the region’s traditional owners, expanded its operations from underground to open-cut. In the process, the company had destroyed sacred sites belonging to the clans and, so they feared, wreaked environmental havoc on the region’s fragile ecosystem.
(This article first appeared on the blog of the World Policy Journal and can be read here)
There we were, at a community meeting of indigenous Australians in the remote Northern Territory town of Borroloola, where dispersed communities of this frontier province come together only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Representatives of the region’s four main linguistic groups—the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa, and Mara—were all here, discussing with a government minister and with one another the impact of a local mine that had, without consultation with the region’s traditional owners, expanded its operations from underground to open-cut. In the process, the company had destroyed sacred sites belonging to the clans and, so they feared, wreaked environmental havoc on the region’s fragile ecosystem.
In addition to the discussion of local issues, talk turned to the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States. The assemblage approved, and, as one indigenous person told me in simply, “he’s one of us.”
Such has been the change of being an American abroad over the last few months, replacing the smirking frat boy of years past with a figure whom, as one Norwegian friend told me, “radiates dignity in a really intense way.” There is a new face of the U.S. global brand abroad, as I witnessed in my reporting travels over the last year, which took me to five continents and countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Spain, Japan, and now Australia.
Australia, my base for the next few months and which commemorates the arrival of Europeans in Australia today, has grappled with its own issues of racial division and violence since the first British settlers arrived in 1788, with the country’s Aboriginal population bearing the brunt of massacre and mistreatment since that time. In recent years, newer arrivals to the country from places like India, Lebanon, and Vietnam have also had to confront a hard kernel of xenophobia here which can be rather shocking to visitors expecting tropical bliss as depicted in tourist brochures.
Though it will no doubt pain and even perhaps offend many Australians to read the words I am about to write, while traveling around the nation and observing the deplorable state of the lives of its original inhabitants—whose communities remind me of some of the impoverished African villages that I have seen and who regularly fall at the bottom of the country’s quality-of-life indicators—it seems that a sombre reflection on the follies of the past, rather than macho braggadocio about “the lucky country,” might not only be a necessary but welcome theme on this year’s occasion, known here as Australia Day. With considerable tensions continuing between the country’s European-descended population and those of Asian, Arab, and Aboriginal descent, it is hard to see when Australia will perhaps have its own Obama moment.
The country’s current prime minister, Kevin Rudd, bravely apologized last year for the nation’s treatment of Aborigines, referring before parliament to “this blemished chapter in our nation’s history…the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering, and loss on these our fellow Australians.” It was the right thing to do, and, given this example, hopefully more and more Australians will begin moving towards this direction of openness and reconciliation.
History is a funny thing. The past is not dead, as William Faulkner once wrote and Barack Obama later reminded us, in fact, it’s not even past.
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press) and a regular contributor to World Policy Journal. His blog can be read at www.michaeldeibert.blogspot.com.
The Trial of Thomas Lubanga
Today, the International Criminal Court at the Hague began the trial of Thomas Lubanga, the former leader of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (Union of Congolese Patriots or UPC), one of several militias responsible for gross human rights abuses during the 1999 to 2007 conflict in the Ituri region of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The conflict claimed some 60,000 of the estimate 6 million lives lost during Congo’s decade-plus and multi-tiered civil war. Lubanga is charged with war crimes, while two other militia leaders from the conflict awaiting trial - Germain Katanga of the Forces de Résistance Patriotique d'Ituri (Patriotic Resistance Forces of Ituri or FRPI) and Mathieu Ngudjolo of the Front nationaliste et intégrationniste (Nationalist and Integrationist Front or FNI) - await trial for war crime as well as crimes against humanity. A fourth militia leader, Bosco Ntaganda, formerly chief of military operations for UPC and now head of a wing of the Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (National Congress for the Defence of the People or CNDP) has also been indicted by the ICC for having "committed war crimes of enlistment and conscription of children under the age of 15" and using the children "to participate actively in hostilities in Ituri." A fourth militia leader, the FNI's Floribert Njabu, is currently in detention in Kinshasa.
As a recent Human Rights Watch release makes clear, the crimes of the military actors in Ituri were indeed ghastly and sickening, and I don’t know if I have ever reported on a more disturbing story, whether it be the aftermath of the war there or the complicity of international companies in helping to fuel the violence. As most of the world has been content to ignore the suffering of Africa in general and Congo in particular for far too long, hopefully Lubanga’s trial will point to a new day of accountability for the worst transgressors in the region and, ultimately, those abroad who assist them financially, materially or otherwise in their bloody business.
As a recent Human Rights Watch release makes clear, the crimes of the military actors in Ituri were indeed ghastly and sickening, and I don’t know if I have ever reported on a more disturbing story, whether it be the aftermath of the war there or the complicity of international companies in helping to fuel the violence. As most of the world has been content to ignore the suffering of Africa in general and Congo in particular for far too long, hopefully Lubanga’s trial will point to a new day of accountability for the worst transgressors in the region and, ultimately, those abroad who assist them financially, materially or otherwise in their bloody business.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Selectively shrugging off world conflicts
NONFICTION
Selectively shrugging off world conflicts
The author attempts to answer why some warfare draws attention while other examples are ignored.
BY Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
STEALTH CONFLICTS: How the World's Worst Violence is Ignored. Virgil Hawkins. Ashgate. 234 pages. $80.
(Read the original article here)
More than six million people perished over the last decade in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Western world's response was little more than a collective shrug. Yet when 10,000 people died during the conflict in Kosovo, the result was a sustained international military intervention.
These are but two of the jarring examples that Virgil Hawkins, a professor at Osaka University's Global Cooperation Center, uses to ponder this question in his important and perceptive new book. Examining a range of conflicts from Africa to the Middle East and Europe, Hawkins seeks to thoroughly dissect why some instances of warfare draw the world's attention while other examples are ignored.
Hawkins argues that the end of the Cold War infinitely complicated matters, as it ''significantly accelerated the rise of warlord politics'' in states such as Cote d'Ivoire, the DRC and Somalia, all of which have been host to brutal civil wars in the past decade.
Though Africa accounts for 90 percent of the world's conflict-related deaths, Hawkins discovers that conflicts on the continent are often met with a condescending ''African solutions for African problems'' refrain. He cites the fact that, from 1999 until 2006, the DRC received only 54 percent of its emergency humanitarian aid requests from the United Nations while Sudan received only 65 percent. Iraq and Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), by contrast, received 91 percent and 68 percent, respectively.
Hawkins adroitly reveals that the sheer number of deaths don't have a major bearing on the level of sympathy elicited from the public to any given conflict. Disputes are filtered through an institutional consciousness determined by sets of competing geopolitical and economic interests that have little to do with the particular heinousness of crimes committed.
The complicated internal dynamics of bodies such as the U.N. and the scramble for funds by non-governmental organizations working in conflict zones also often fall victim to such politicking. Hawkins finds that scholars not infrequently reflect this already-fractured mirror, focusing largely on conflicts or events that have already been pre-determined as important by various sectors of the powerful.
When it comes to critiquing the media, Hawkins' footing is a bit less sure. The book occasionally uses sources to explain media indifference that are less than trustworthy, such as the commentators Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, whose claims about press coverage of the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia have been convincingly debunked.
But it is hard to find fault with Hawkins' contention that the decimation of foreign bureaus for the print media (particularly in the United States) has resulted in an ever-shrinking pool of coverage, with greatly disproportionate attention given to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in comparison with other, more deadly, wars around the globe.
Refusing to resign himself to hopelessness, however, Hawkins calls upon all of the international actors concerned to do a better job when confronting some of the world's most intractably violent problems:
``When even a cursory glance reveals how grossly distorted the image of the state of conflict of the world is, the realization of some form of proportion between image and reality, and between scale and response, is not too much to hope for.''
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.
Selectively shrugging off world conflicts
The author attempts to answer why some warfare draws attention while other examples are ignored.
BY Michael Deibert
The Miami Herald
STEALTH CONFLICTS: How the World's Worst Violence is Ignored. Virgil Hawkins. Ashgate. 234 pages. $80.
(Read the original article here)
More than six million people perished over the last decade in the wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Western world's response was little more than a collective shrug. Yet when 10,000 people died during the conflict in Kosovo, the result was a sustained international military intervention.
These are but two of the jarring examples that Virgil Hawkins, a professor at Osaka University's Global Cooperation Center, uses to ponder this question in his important and perceptive new book. Examining a range of conflicts from Africa to the Middle East and Europe, Hawkins seeks to thoroughly dissect why some instances of warfare draw the world's attention while other examples are ignored.
Hawkins argues that the end of the Cold War infinitely complicated matters, as it ''significantly accelerated the rise of warlord politics'' in states such as Cote d'Ivoire, the DRC and Somalia, all of which have been host to brutal civil wars in the past decade.
Though Africa accounts for 90 percent of the world's conflict-related deaths, Hawkins discovers that conflicts on the continent are often met with a condescending ''African solutions for African problems'' refrain. He cites the fact that, from 1999 until 2006, the DRC received only 54 percent of its emergency humanitarian aid requests from the United Nations while Sudan received only 65 percent. Iraq and Europe (including the former Yugoslavia), by contrast, received 91 percent and 68 percent, respectively.
Hawkins adroitly reveals that the sheer number of deaths don't have a major bearing on the level of sympathy elicited from the public to any given conflict. Disputes are filtered through an institutional consciousness determined by sets of competing geopolitical and economic interests that have little to do with the particular heinousness of crimes committed.
The complicated internal dynamics of bodies such as the U.N. and the scramble for funds by non-governmental organizations working in conflict zones also often fall victim to such politicking. Hawkins finds that scholars not infrequently reflect this already-fractured mirror, focusing largely on conflicts or events that have already been pre-determined as important by various sectors of the powerful.
When it comes to critiquing the media, Hawkins' footing is a bit less sure. The book occasionally uses sources to explain media indifference that are less than trustworthy, such as the commentators Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, whose claims about press coverage of the former Yugoslavia and Cambodia have been convincingly debunked.
But it is hard to find fault with Hawkins' contention that the decimation of foreign bureaus for the print media (particularly in the United States) has resulted in an ever-shrinking pool of coverage, with greatly disproportionate attention given to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in comparison with other, more deadly, wars around the globe.
Refusing to resign himself to hopelessness, however, Hawkins calls upon all of the international actors concerned to do a better job when confronting some of the world's most intractably violent problems:
``When even a cursory glance reveals how grossly distorted the image of the state of conflict of the world is, the realization of some form of proportion between image and reality, and between scale and response, is not too much to hope for.''
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Notes from Borroloola
In Australia’s remote Northern Territory, the small town of Borroloola represents for many, both theoretically and literally, the end of the line, only a scant few miles away from the Gulf of Carpentaria as it empties out into the Arafura Sea. Once a way-station for outlaws and all sorts of criminal drift from Australia’s southern reaches, Borroloola has nevertheless historically been of great importance to four of the country’s most important indigenous linguistic groupings, the Gurdanji, Yanyuwa, Garawa and Mara.Visiting the region to examine the controversy surrounding a mining project, its affect on the local population, and what the results of decades of official neglect and indifference have had on Australia’s indigenous inhabitants (one of the oldest continuous groupings of humanity on earth), I drove down the thinnest ribbons of road, populated by a vast array of endemic flora and fauna that were bracing in its natural beauty, so different than the civic mistakes that pose as town in the south of the country. In Borroloola itself, I felt transported back to central Africa, not only because of the landscape but, alas, from the glaring lack of basic services to the original residents of what is ostensibly one of the world’s richest democracies. I must also, say, though, that I found a great dignity and awareness of history and tradition among the Aboriginal residents there, that gives me some small hope that this ancient and important culture will not be lost entirely, no matter what forces are arrayed against it.
For my travels in Australia thus far, in addition to the novia, I have had as company some fine books, the most relevant to my understanding of the places thus far having been National Geographic writer Harvey Arden’s quite beautiful account of his conversations with Aboriginal elders, Dreamkeepers: A Spirit-Journey into Aboriginal Australia, the art critic Robert Hughes’ often hair-raising account of the country’s conquest by its white population, The Fatal Shore, and, by way of a gift from Australian Broadcasting Corporation journalist Murray McLaughlin in Darwin last week, Nicholas Jose’s Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola, an account of his search for the true history of an opportunely long-lost relative, the Borroloola hermit Roger Jose.
Back from Borroloola and now ensconced in Sydney once more, we await, with the rest of the world, the innaugruation of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States. As one indigenous person told me in Borroloola, “he’s one of us.”
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Gaza: ICRC demands urgent access to wounded as Israeli army fails to assist wounded Palestinians
(Given the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, I feel compelled to do what I rarely do on this blog: Reprint verbatim a statement by an international organization. I think that the following release by the International Committee of the Red Cross gives some feeling for the scope and severity of the crisis, and suggests who may at present may be exacerbating the suffering of civilians in the zone. MD)
News release 09/04
The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israel Defense Forces during the afternoon of 7 January.
News release 09/04
Gaza: ICRC demands urgent access to wounded as Israeli army fails to assist wounded Palestinians
(Please read the original press release here)
International Committee of the Red Cross
Geneva/Jerusalem/Tel Aviv (ICRC) - On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling.
(Please read the original press release here)
International Committee of the Red Cross
Geneva/Jerusalem/Tel Aviv (ICRC) - On the afternoon of 7 January, four Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) ambulances and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to obtain access for the first time to several houses in the Zaytun neighbourhood of Gaza City that had been affected by Israeli shelling.
The ICRC had requested safe passage for ambulances to access this neighbourhood since 3 January but it only received permission to do so from the Israel Defense Forces during the afternoon of 7 January.
The ICRC/PRCS team found four small children next to their dead mothers in one of the houses. They were too weak to stand up on their own. One man was also found alive, too weak to stand up. In all there were at least 12 corpses lying on mattresses.
In another house, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team found 15 other survivors of this attack including several wounded. In yet another house, they found an additional three corpses. Israeli soldiers posted at a military position some 80 meters away from this house ordered the rescue team to leave the area which they refused to do. There were several other positions of the Israel Defense Forces nearby as well as two tanks.
"This is a shocking incident," said Pierre Wettach, the ICRC's head of delegation for Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. "The Israeli military must have been aware of the situation but did not assist the wounded. Neither did they make it possible for us or the Palestine Red Crescent to assist the wounded."
Large earth walls erected by the Israeli army had made it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighbourhood. Therefore, the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart. In total, the ICRC/PRCS rescue team evacuated 18 wounded and 12 others who were extremely exhausted. Two corpses were also evacuated. The ICRC/PRCS will recover the remaining corpses on Thursday.
The ICRC was informed that there are more wounded sheltering in other destroyed houses in this neighbourhood. It demands that the Israeli military grant it and PRCS ambulances safe passage and access immediately to search for any other wounded. Until now, the ICRC has still not received confirmation from the Israeli authorities that this will be allowed.
The ICRC believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable.
For further information, please contact:
Florian Westphal, ICRC Geneva, tel.: +41 22 730 22 82 or +41 79 217 32 80
Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, ICRC Jerusalem, tel +972 2 582 88 45 or +972 52 601 91 50
Florian Westphal, ICRC Geneva, tel.: +41 22 730 22 82 or +41 79 217 32 80
Anne-Sophie Bonefeld, ICRC Jerusalem, tel +972 2 582 88 45 or +972 52 601 91 50
Drugs vs. Democracy in Guatemala
Drugs vs. Democracy in Guatemala
By Michael Deibert
World Policy Journal
Winter 2008/09, Vol. 25, No. 4, Pages 167-175
MORALES, GUATEMALA—With shops selling expensive leather saddles and men in cowboy hats strutting through its lanes, this town of 50,000 in Guatemala's eastern department of Izabal has long been the heartland of the country's cattle-raising and farming industries. Situated on a flat plain emptying out into the Caribbean Sea and crisscrossed by the meandering Rio Dulce, Morales has in recent years been the epicenter of a far more lethal trade. It has become ground zero for the country's increasingly violent role as a way station for cocaine bound from South America to feed ravenous appetites in the United States.
There are hints of this in aspects of daily life in Morales—from the visible Glock pistols and Uzi submachine guns sported by men descending from pick-up trucks and sport-utility vehicles with blacked-out windows, to the sprawling and curiously empty new luxury hotels, as well as a body count that usually numbers well over a dozen in the course of a single week.
"There has been a great increase in violence in the area in the last several months, which would suggest that a turf war was going on," says a priest who has been working in the region since the late 1980s but declined to be named for this article out of fear for his safety. "Weekends here are dangerous."
In March, Juan "Juancho" José León Ardón, a local man said to be a drug lord, was killed along with ten other men in a wild shootout in neighboring Zacapa state, where Guatemalan police later recovered 16 semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles and an M-16. Along with the body of Juancho— who'd fled a Mexican prison in 2001—and several of his bodyguards, were found the bodies of two Mexican nationals, believed to member of Los Zetas, the brutal rogue soldiers who act as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the Mexican crime syndicate. ("Zeta" comes from the Mexican federal police radio code for high-ranking officers.) Jauncho was believed by local law enforcement officials to have been working as a middle man, helping to bring cocaine from Colombia to Mexico in the service of the Gulf Cartel's arch-rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquín "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzmán. Fighting between the two groups has killed hundreds of people in Mexico in recent years.
The level of insecurity in Guatemala has reached such a level that, in impoverished neighborhoods such as the capital's gritty Villa Nueva slum, often the scene of inter-gang warfare, heavily-armed masked men (thought to be off-duty police officers) scoop suspected gang members from the streets, never to be seen again except in city morgues or dumped by the side of the road. For those of more substantial means, there is the world of gates, guards, and highly disciplined movements, an existence that condemns those who live it to dwelling in their own kind of ghetto, and brings no great peace of mind. The links between private security contractors and organized crime are substantial and continuing.
The gun battle that killed Juancho, his men, and the Mexicans was not an isolated incident, nor was it by any stretch the most shocking crime to take place in Guatemala in recent years. According to figures released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), from 1999 to 2006, Guatemala's homicide rate increased more than 120 percent, from 2,655 homicides in 1999 to 6,033 in 2006, a national homicide rate of 47 per 100,000 inhabitants—though still trailing the murder rates of its neighbors to the south, El Salvador and Honduras. Even given these grim statistics, the UNDP numbers noted that only a fraction of all victims of violence were taken into account by Guatemalan police and justice statistics.
The Zacapa massacre, however, was indicative of a larger pattern. The ability of the Mexican gunmen—who witnesses said numbered at least 30—to pass fully-armed and unhindered across the length of Guatemala, engage in a prolonged and fatal firefight and then simply vanish into thin air made perfectly clear one other central fact of Guatemala's current agony. Official complicity has abetted at every turn the wave of drug-related violence that has cleaved Guatemalan society like a bloody scythe in recent years—ensnaring in the drug war vast numbers of public officials, drug traffickers, gang members, and ordinary civilians. The next casualty, many fear, will be Guatemala's nascent democracy itself.
Roots of War
The roots of the country's current crisis lay in Guatemala's three decade-long civil war, which lasted from 1960 until 1996. Successive Guatemalan governments—often with the complicity of the United States—battled to defeat a leftist insurgency centered in the country's mountainous and jungle-covered recesses. As a series of military dictators built up a sophisticated intelligence-gathering and surveillance capability in the late 1970s and 1980s, members of Guatemala's armed forces, with little regard for human rights, were given free rein to battle rebels in a conflict that eventually claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.
During the regimes of dictators General Romeo Lucas García (1978–82) and his successor General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), in particular, elements of Guatemala's military intelligence services were able to create complex criminal networks that exist more or less intact to this day. Lucas García fled to exile in Venezuela, where he died in 2006. Ríos Montt went on to found the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG), one of Guatemala's main political parties. In 2003, he even ran, though unsuccessfully, for the country's presidency. He currently serves as the FRG's secretary general and as a deputy in Guatemala's congress.
Often referred to as the grupos clandestinos, or hidden powers, these criminal-military groups represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the government of Álvaro Colom, Guatemala's current president, who also serves as the head of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party. The activities of the hidden powers are varied and include skimming customs duties, illicitly acquiring government contracts, human trafficking, and increasingly, drug trafficking. A weak Guatemalan state together with broad, and largely unpatrolled, Pacific and Caribbean coastlines combine to provide an alluring middle passage for drugs flowing to North America from points south. A 2003 study by the Washington Office on Latin America titled "Hidden Powers in Post-Conflict Guatemala," asserted that the groups "do not act on their own, but at the behest of members of an interconnected set of powerful Guatemalans...[who] oversee and profit from a variety of illegal activities that they carry out with little fear of arrest or prosecution."
Once used as a tool by Guatemala's tiny economic and political elite to bludgeon leftist opposition in the country, the grupos clandestinos have now taken on a nefarious and powerful life of their own.
"When the oligarchy made the military such a crucial factor during the internal armed conflict, the only presence of the state nationwide was the military," says Frank LaRue, a veteran human rights advocate who currently heads the Instituto Demos, a Guatemala civil society organization.
"The military gained a lot of political power and began making their own economic base, and, obviously, those who were leaving the military, or some of them, began getting connected with drugs, exactly as is happening in Mexico," says LaRue, who served as head of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights in the government of Colom's predecessor, Óscar Berger.
The Brotherhood
Perhaps the best-known and most-feared criminal syndicates in the country are La Cofradía (The Brotherhood) and El Sindicato (The Syndicate), both made up of current and former military officers, according to Guatemalan and U.S. government officials.
La Cofradía is believed to have its roots in the military intelligence wing of the government of former dictator Lucas García, and to be comprised chiefly of those who advocated a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach to prosecuting Guatemala's civil war, making little distinction between military and civilian targets. Known at the time as los estratégicos (the strategic ones), the group is said to be chiefly directed by two former generals, Manuel Callejas y Callejas and Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo.
During Ortega Menaldo's time in the armed forces, he served as head of army intelligence when the Guatemalan army was coordinating interdiction efforts with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and so became privy to the organization's methods and modus operandi. At the same time, the American government was financing complex surveillance equipment which enabled Guatemalan military intelligence—not to mention whoever else might be working in the sector—to engage in sophisticated intelligence gathering in the name of combating the country's leftist guerillas and nascent drug traffickers.
Previously a military intelligence official in various capacities during the Lucas García administration and in the 1991–93 civilian government of President Jorge Serrano Elías, Ortega Menaldo became head of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), a controversial military unit disbanded in 2003 which had been tied to appalling human rights abuses both before and after the 1996 peace accords brought an end to Guatemala's internal armed conflict. The EMP has been linked to a series of high-profile assassinations over the years, including the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas González Dubón and the 1998 beating death of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi.
In his position with the EMP, Ortega Menaldo continued to work closely with military intelligence until Elías attempted to seize dictatorial powers in May 1993. Though this auto-golpe (self-coup), as it became known, was quickly defeated, Ortega Menaldo was among the military officers supportive of Elías' move, and was heavily marginalized in the government of Ramiro de León Carpio that came after. Ortega Menaldo was dismissed from active duty for corruption in 1996 under the government of President Álvaro Arzú. In March 2002, the government of the United States revoked Ortega Menaldo's travel visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing such action against people who have allowed or conspired in drug trafficking.
According to a report by the Recuperación de Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory) project—an undertaking that Bishop Gerardi oversaw shortly before his murder—the members of La Cofradía are linked by human rights abuses committed during the civil war and the "competition and loyalty between men from the same graduating class intermingled and changed according to opportunities of the moment." Similar to the Italian mafia, La Cofradía is said to have an elaborate initiation ritual, which includes placing a medallion engraved with the inductee's name, class promotion, and a magic lamp— the organization's symbol—at the bottom of a glass of whiskey, which the new member must then drink in order to claim.
The Rise of Pérez Molina
The soldiers who graduated from Guatemala's military academy in 1969— "Promotion 73," as the group became known—were thrown into a world of bloody conflict throughout the Americas, but especially in their native country. As happens sometimes among military officers of the same graduating class, loyalties among these men continued throughout their careers. Advocating a strategy of pacification and stabilization during the war, which preferred combining development projects and military objectives as opposed to all-out warfare against the rebels, this group as such often found itself at odds with los estratégicos.
The group's most visible member, Otto Pérez Molina, led the group of military officers that opposed Elías' 1993 self-coup, a position that created a climate of lasting enmity between himself and Ortega Menaldo, who had supported the move. While Ortega Menaldo was sent into the wilderness after the failed 1993 coup, Pérez Molina saw his own star rise with his appointment as inspector general of the army in 1996, a high-profile role as the Guatemalan military's representative at negotiations with rebel forces that eventually led to peace accords and, in 1998, his appointment as head the of the Guatemalan delegation before the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC. But with the rise to prominence of Rios Montt's FRG and the presidency of Alfonso Portillo—an Ortega Menaldo confidant—Pérez Molina retired from military service.
In February 2001, Pérez Molina formed the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party, or PP). Briefly, and perhaps a touch ironically given subsequent events, he also found common cause with Colom's UNE as they jointly denounced Portillo's alleged abuse of power. Later, however, the PP was incorporated into the Gran Alianza Nacional (Great National Alliance, or GANA) coalition of the eventual winner (and Colom opponent) in the 2003 presidential elections, Óscar Berger. In those same elections, Pérez Molina was elected as a deputy to Guatemala's congress for the coalition.
In the 2007 general elections, one of the bloodiest ballots in Guatemala's history with over 50 candidates and activists slain, Pérez Molina ran against Álvaro Colom for the presidency, a ballot that he lost despite his advocacy of a mano dura (strong hand) policy against the country's criminals. During the trajectory of Pérez Molina's political life, both his son and daughter have been the victims of non-fatal attacks by gunmen, and at least eight members of the PP have been slain.
Over the years, however, security analysts and Guatemalan government officials say that Promotion 73 took on another, shadowy, but far more violent, role—that of El Sindicato. The syndicate immediately took its place as one of Guatemala's most powerful clandestine groups, and one whose struggle against La Cofradía must be understood in order to grasp the nature of the country's current demons.
Politics by Other Means
One of the most destructive influences on Guatemala's fragile state appears to have been the rise of the FRG party throughout the 1990s. Founded by former dictator Efraín Rios Montt in 1989, the FRG melded a virulent hatred of Guatemala's traditional economic elite with populist economic and social rhetoric that attempted to cast it as the voice of Guatemala's disenfranchised. This stance was especially ironic given the ghastly human rights abuses against Guatemala's indigenous population that were the hallmark of Rios Montt's tenure as president and the strong element of current and former military officials in the party's ranks.
In 1999, Alfonso Portillo, a former university professor who had killed two men during an altercation in Mexico while teaching there in 1982 (a fact he has never disputed), ran for the presidency under the FRG banner and won, ascending to the office the following year. Though Portillo's rhetoric adhered to progressive social-democratic goals, his tenure was marked by a high degree of corruption and political violence.
In 1996, shortly before Portillo attained the presidency, both he and Ortega Menaldo were implicated in a corruption scandal centering around Salvadoran-born Alfredo Moreno Molina. Originally working on counter-insurgency efforts within the Guatemalan military, Molina later was prosecuted for having set up a sophisticated corruption ring known as the Grupo Salvavidas or Lifesaver Group. Ortega Menaldo was subsequently dismissed from the military for his involvement in the affair, and Portillo admitted taking campaign contributions from Moreno. During Portillo's subsequent tenure as president, Ortega Menaldo served as one of his closest advisors. The power of Guatemala's already weak state, which has only 26,000 national police to control a country of some 13 million, eroded still further as the private security sector swelled to 120,000 individuals. A substantial number maintained links to organized crime.
"Before Portillo, these bodies were just giving security to some organized crime groups, but during Portillo they became contractors of the state," says José Carlos Marroquín, who served as chief strategist for Álvaro Colom during his presidential campaign. Eventually, Marroquín resigned, following threats from organized crime. For his efforts at cleaning up Guatemala's political system, Marroquín's Guatemala City home, where he lives with his wife and children, was raked with automatic weapons fire and set ablaze during a 10-minute assault last year.
"I don't measure the state by its size, I measure the state by its strength," continues Marroquín, who also says that clandestine armed groups have an interest in undermining the state. Waves of what would appear to be carefully organized violence would seem to support this. In February 2008, a dozen bus drivers in the capital were slain, while in November of the same year 15 people on a charter bus from Nicaragua were killed execution-style and their bodies set alight after passing into Guatemala.
Only days after turning over power to his elected successor, Óscar Berger, in 2004, Portillo fled to Mexico, where he remained until October 2008 despite a Mexican government order to extradite him back to Guatemala to face corruption charges. That month, Portillo announced that he would no longer fight extradition as he "trusted" the Guatemalan courts under Colom more than he did under Berger. Though rumors swirled that Portillo had helped fund part of Colom's election campaign from exile, none of these charges have been proven.
Though the FRG suffered badly in the 2007 elections, and its influence in Guatemala's congress has significantly diminished, its activities while controlling the presidency and the congress included extending state largess to former members of civil defense patrols formed as a counter-insurgency tool by Rios Montt a quarter century ago. These patrols have been implicated in gross human rights abuses. In today's Guatemala, some of the same regions where those patrols were the strongest, such as the jungle-covered department of El Petén, have now also become centers of illegal drug activity, with some of the same campesinos who once worked for the civil patrols now seizing land and clearing clandestine runways where drug planes can land. On one government map seen by this reporter, there were 31 such runways listed as existing in El Petén alone.
Add to this mix Central America's indigenous street gangs—particularly the MS-18 and MS-13 in Guatemala—and the terrible strains placed on Guatemala's fragile justice system become quite clear. This toxic brew of politicians, organized crime syndicates, street gangs, and foreign cartels, and the seeming inability of the justice system in Guatemala to address it, has led some observers to point to the Guatemalan state itself as part of the problem.
"There have been a number of cases where [the hidden powers] use the gangs as muscle," says a U.S. law enforcement official who has worked on drug trafficking and organized crime in Guatemala for over a decade, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "[But] there is a lack of in-depth investigations by the judicial sector....The Guatemalans have been slow in reacting to the real threat that exists."
Death in the Afternoon
One midday in June 2008, Vinicio Gomez, Álvaro Colom's Minister of Interior and widely regarded as an honest public official, boarded a helicopter piloted by a veteran of DEA missions in Colombia and Panama. Flying through a light rain over the department of Alta Verapaz, Gomez' helicopter crashed, killing him, the pilot, deputy minister Edgar Hernandez, and one other person. Though there was no major storm in the area, the official cause of the crash was attributed to bad weather.
According to a high-ranking official in the Colom government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in the months before the crash, Gomez had quarreled violently with Carlos Quintanilla, an associate of Ortega Menaldo who was at the time the head of the Secretaría de Asuntos Administrativos y de Seguridad (Secretariat for Administrative Matters and Security, or SAAS), the successor to the EMP responsible for the president's personal security. Those familiar with the conversation say that Quintanilla was vexed at Gomez's plan to deploy hundreds of troops and anti-drug agents along Guatemala's long border with Mexico, where cartel boss Juan Alberto "Chamalé" Ortiz López is thought to have been the first to use the Mexican Zetas in and around the city of Huehuetenango.
With the death of Gomez—a death that not a single government or civilian official I spoke with in Guatemala believes was an accident—an administration already handicapped in asserting its authority was further weakened. Subsequently, an arrest warrant was issued for Quintanilla, after Colom concluded that the security chief had planted surveillance devices in his home and offices at the behest of organized criminal gangs. Quintanilla has since gone to ground.
"Colom's guys are Ortega Menaldo's guys," says one Guatemalan government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, attempting to explain the Faustian bargain that Colom is said to have made for his own security. "He needed them as protection against Pérez Molina."
Such are the implications of political activity in Guatemala—that a long-time social democrat such as Colom might be forced to form an alliance, however temporary, with figures long rumored to be deeply enmeshed in organized crime. As if the suspicious death of Gomez was not enough, barely two months earlier, Victor Rivera, a Venezuelan citizen who had served as a long-time security advisor to several Guatemalan governments, was slain in a shooting in the capital. Dismissed by Colom only a week before for being "too independent," Rivera, though he denied any wrongdoing, was thought also to have been behind summary executions of suspected gang members throughout his tenure, a reputation that gained him as many admirers as critics in crime-weary Guatemala. This past August, the killing continued with the murder of Rigoberto Cucul, the former FRG-affiliated mayor of El Estor, a city near Morales, who perished in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Police had previously raided his home in search of narcotics but said they found only ammunition.
But perhaps no crime has shaken the foundations of Guatemala and its neighbors in recent years as much as the slaying of three Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament, kidnapped and killed along with their driver, while traveling to Guatemala for a parliamentary meeting in February 2007. The victims included Eduardo Jose d'Aubuisson, the 32-year-old son of Roberto d'Aubuisson, an extreme rightist and founder of El Salvador's ruling ARENA party who died of cancer in 1991. The four bodies were found burned almost beyond recognition on a rural roadside after becoming separated from a larger convoy. It appears that the killings were linked to a power struggle for drug trafficking inside ARENA, though the motive is still murky.
The same month, four policemen being held in connection with the slayings were also murdered when gunmen entered the prison east of Guatemala City, where they were being held. The assassins were able somehow to reach their victims despite having to pass through eight sets of locked doors to get to their cells. And this past July, the judge in charge of investigating the murders was also slain. In September 2008, Guatemalan security forces arrested a former congressman and mayor, Manuel de Jesus Castillo, who is suspected of being one of the masterminds of the crime. Castillo had apparently been hiding in plain sight, living for months in his hometown of Jutiapa despite a January 2008 warrant for his arrest.
Added to the mix has been the curious behavior of the Salvadoran government itself. Despite strong statements from El Salvador's President Tony Saca and his public security minister, Rene Figueroa, that the culprits of the slayings of the parliamentarians must be found and punished, as of yet no investigation into the crime has been opened in El Salvador itself
.
Steps Toward Reform?
One hopeful development in Guatemala's struggle against organized crime has been the creation of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG), a United Nations-affiliated body charged with investigating organized crime's links to the state. Operational since the beginning of 2008, under its current mandate, the CICIG has the power to investigate a wide array of violent and organized crime and submit the evidence to Guatemala officials, but not the power to subpoena or indict. Carlos Castresana Fernández, a Spanish magistrate who previously worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in the drug-ravaged Mexican state of Nuevo León, and who has a long history of anti-corruption prosecutions in his native country, was appointed to head the body.
"A great problem of impunity exists in this country," Castresana told me in an interview in Guatemala City. "One of the biggest justifications for the creation of this commission is the existence of clandestine security apparatuses [in Guatemala] that have inserted themselves within the state institutions."
While policy makers and law enforcement officials in the United States are largely concentrating their energies on the war going on between narco-traffickers and the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, or lauding Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's strides against that country's 40-year-old, drug-financed insurgency, democracy in Guatemala—the most populous country in Central America—is fighting for its life against a rising tide of drug-related violence that has become inextricably linked with the country's political landscape.
The Merida Initiative, a multi-year U.S. proposal aiming to provide equipment, training, reform, and oversight to law enforcement agencies in the region, last year requested an initial $500 million for Mexico and $50 million for all of Central America. During fiscal year 2009, the U.S. government's budget proposal includes $450 million for Mexico and $100 million for Central America.
It is a paltry sum, many Guatemalans feel, given the challenges their nation will confront as it faces down the hidden powers.
"Guatemala is already a weak, almost non-existent, state that does not guarantee security or justice or health or education," says the human rights advocate Frank LaRue. "If the cartels from Mexico begin to move down and Guatemala completely collapses into their hands, then you will have a real problem."
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last reported for World Policy Journal from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
By Michael Deibert
World Policy Journal
Winter 2008/09, Vol. 25, No. 4, Pages 167-175
MORALES, GUATEMALA—With shops selling expensive leather saddles and men in cowboy hats strutting through its lanes, this town of 50,000 in Guatemala's eastern department of Izabal has long been the heartland of the country's cattle-raising and farming industries. Situated on a flat plain emptying out into the Caribbean Sea and crisscrossed by the meandering Rio Dulce, Morales has in recent years been the epicenter of a far more lethal trade. It has become ground zero for the country's increasingly violent role as a way station for cocaine bound from South America to feed ravenous appetites in the United States.
There are hints of this in aspects of daily life in Morales—from the visible Glock pistols and Uzi submachine guns sported by men descending from pick-up trucks and sport-utility vehicles with blacked-out windows, to the sprawling and curiously empty new luxury hotels, as well as a body count that usually numbers well over a dozen in the course of a single week.
"There has been a great increase in violence in the area in the last several months, which would suggest that a turf war was going on," says a priest who has been working in the region since the late 1980s but declined to be named for this article out of fear for his safety. "Weekends here are dangerous."
In March, Juan "Juancho" José León Ardón, a local man said to be a drug lord, was killed along with ten other men in a wild shootout in neighboring Zacapa state, where Guatemalan police later recovered 16 semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifles and an M-16. Along with the body of Juancho— who'd fled a Mexican prison in 2001—and several of his bodyguards, were found the bodies of two Mexican nationals, believed to member of Los Zetas, the brutal rogue soldiers who act as enforcers for the Gulf Cartel, the Mexican crime syndicate. ("Zeta" comes from the Mexican federal police radio code for high-ranking officers.) Jauncho was believed by local law enforcement officials to have been working as a middle man, helping to bring cocaine from Colombia to Mexico in the service of the Gulf Cartel's arch-rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquín "El Chapo" (Shorty) Guzmán. Fighting between the two groups has killed hundreds of people in Mexico in recent years.
The level of insecurity in Guatemala has reached such a level that, in impoverished neighborhoods such as the capital's gritty Villa Nueva slum, often the scene of inter-gang warfare, heavily-armed masked men (thought to be off-duty police officers) scoop suspected gang members from the streets, never to be seen again except in city morgues or dumped by the side of the road. For those of more substantial means, there is the world of gates, guards, and highly disciplined movements, an existence that condemns those who live it to dwelling in their own kind of ghetto, and brings no great peace of mind. The links between private security contractors and organized crime are substantial and continuing.
The gun battle that killed Juancho, his men, and the Mexicans was not an isolated incident, nor was it by any stretch the most shocking crime to take place in Guatemala in recent years. According to figures released by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), from 1999 to 2006, Guatemala's homicide rate increased more than 120 percent, from 2,655 homicides in 1999 to 6,033 in 2006, a national homicide rate of 47 per 100,000 inhabitants—though still trailing the murder rates of its neighbors to the south, El Salvador and Honduras. Even given these grim statistics, the UNDP numbers noted that only a fraction of all victims of violence were taken into account by Guatemalan police and justice statistics.
The Zacapa massacre, however, was indicative of a larger pattern. The ability of the Mexican gunmen—who witnesses said numbered at least 30—to pass fully-armed and unhindered across the length of Guatemala, engage in a prolonged and fatal firefight and then simply vanish into thin air made perfectly clear one other central fact of Guatemala's current agony. Official complicity has abetted at every turn the wave of drug-related violence that has cleaved Guatemalan society like a bloody scythe in recent years—ensnaring in the drug war vast numbers of public officials, drug traffickers, gang members, and ordinary civilians. The next casualty, many fear, will be Guatemala's nascent democracy itself.
Roots of War
The roots of the country's current crisis lay in Guatemala's three decade-long civil war, which lasted from 1960 until 1996. Successive Guatemalan governments—often with the complicity of the United States—battled to defeat a leftist insurgency centered in the country's mountainous and jungle-covered recesses. As a series of military dictators built up a sophisticated intelligence-gathering and surveillance capability in the late 1970s and 1980s, members of Guatemala's armed forces, with little regard for human rights, were given free rein to battle rebels in a conflict that eventually claimed an estimated 200,000 lives.
During the regimes of dictators General Romeo Lucas García (1978–82) and his successor General Efraín Ríos Montt (1982–83), in particular, elements of Guatemala's military intelligence services were able to create complex criminal networks that exist more or less intact to this day. Lucas García fled to exile in Venezuela, where he died in 2006. Ríos Montt went on to found the Frente Republicano Guatemalteco (Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG), one of Guatemala's main political parties. In 2003, he even ran, though unsuccessfully, for the country's presidency. He currently serves as the FRG's secretary general and as a deputy in Guatemala's congress.
Often referred to as the grupos clandestinos, or hidden powers, these criminal-military groups represent perhaps the biggest challenge to the government of Álvaro Colom, Guatemala's current president, who also serves as the head of the left-wing Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE) party. The activities of the hidden powers are varied and include skimming customs duties, illicitly acquiring government contracts, human trafficking, and increasingly, drug trafficking. A weak Guatemalan state together with broad, and largely unpatrolled, Pacific and Caribbean coastlines combine to provide an alluring middle passage for drugs flowing to North America from points south. A 2003 study by the Washington Office on Latin America titled "Hidden Powers in Post-Conflict Guatemala," asserted that the groups "do not act on their own, but at the behest of members of an interconnected set of powerful Guatemalans...[who] oversee and profit from a variety of illegal activities that they carry out with little fear of arrest or prosecution."
Once used as a tool by Guatemala's tiny economic and political elite to bludgeon leftist opposition in the country, the grupos clandestinos have now taken on a nefarious and powerful life of their own.
"When the oligarchy made the military such a crucial factor during the internal armed conflict, the only presence of the state nationwide was the military," says Frank LaRue, a veteran human rights advocate who currently heads the Instituto Demos, a Guatemala civil society organization.
"The military gained a lot of political power and began making their own economic base, and, obviously, those who were leaving the military, or some of them, began getting connected with drugs, exactly as is happening in Mexico," says LaRue, who served as head of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights in the government of Colom's predecessor, Óscar Berger.
The Brotherhood
Perhaps the best-known and most-feared criminal syndicates in the country are La Cofradía (The Brotherhood) and El Sindicato (The Syndicate), both made up of current and former military officers, according to Guatemalan and U.S. government officials.
La Cofradía is believed to have its roots in the military intelligence wing of the government of former dictator Lucas García, and to be comprised chiefly of those who advocated a scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners approach to prosecuting Guatemala's civil war, making little distinction between military and civilian targets. Known at the time as los estratégicos (the strategic ones), the group is said to be chiefly directed by two former generals, Manuel Callejas y Callejas and Luis Francisco Ortega Menaldo.
During Ortega Menaldo's time in the armed forces, he served as head of army intelligence when the Guatemalan army was coordinating interdiction efforts with the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and so became privy to the organization's methods and modus operandi. At the same time, the American government was financing complex surveillance equipment which enabled Guatemalan military intelligence—not to mention whoever else might be working in the sector—to engage in sophisticated intelligence gathering in the name of combating the country's leftist guerillas and nascent drug traffickers.
Previously a military intelligence official in various capacities during the Lucas García administration and in the 1991–93 civilian government of President Jorge Serrano Elías, Ortega Menaldo became head of the Estado Mayor Presidencial (EMP), a controversial military unit disbanded in 2003 which had been tied to appalling human rights abuses both before and after the 1996 peace accords brought an end to Guatemala's internal armed conflict. The EMP has been linked to a series of high-profile assassinations over the years, including the 1990 murder of anthropologist Myrna Mack, the 1994 killing of Constitutional Court President Eduardo Epaminondas González Dubón and the 1998 beating death of Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi.
In his position with the EMP, Ortega Menaldo continued to work closely with military intelligence until Elías attempted to seize dictatorial powers in May 1993. Though this auto-golpe (self-coup), as it became known, was quickly defeated, Ortega Menaldo was among the military officers supportive of Elías' move, and was heavily marginalized in the government of Ramiro de León Carpio that came after. Ortega Menaldo was dismissed from active duty for corruption in 1996 under the government of President Álvaro Arzú. In March 2002, the government of the United States revoked Ortega Menaldo's travel visa under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing such action against people who have allowed or conspired in drug trafficking.
According to a report by the Recuperación de Memoria Histórica (Recovery of Historical Memory) project—an undertaking that Bishop Gerardi oversaw shortly before his murder—the members of La Cofradía are linked by human rights abuses committed during the civil war and the "competition and loyalty between men from the same graduating class intermingled and changed according to opportunities of the moment." Similar to the Italian mafia, La Cofradía is said to have an elaborate initiation ritual, which includes placing a medallion engraved with the inductee's name, class promotion, and a magic lamp— the organization's symbol—at the bottom of a glass of whiskey, which the new member must then drink in order to claim.
The Rise of Pérez Molina
The soldiers who graduated from Guatemala's military academy in 1969— "Promotion 73," as the group became known—were thrown into a world of bloody conflict throughout the Americas, but especially in their native country. As happens sometimes among military officers of the same graduating class, loyalties among these men continued throughout their careers. Advocating a strategy of pacification and stabilization during the war, which preferred combining development projects and military objectives as opposed to all-out warfare against the rebels, this group as such often found itself at odds with los estratégicos.
The group's most visible member, Otto Pérez Molina, led the group of military officers that opposed Elías' 1993 self-coup, a position that created a climate of lasting enmity between himself and Ortega Menaldo, who had supported the move. While Ortega Menaldo was sent into the wilderness after the failed 1993 coup, Pérez Molina saw his own star rise with his appointment as inspector general of the army in 1996, a high-profile role as the Guatemalan military's representative at negotiations with rebel forces that eventually led to peace accords and, in 1998, his appointment as head the of the Guatemalan delegation before the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington, DC. But with the rise to prominence of Rios Montt's FRG and the presidency of Alfonso Portillo—an Ortega Menaldo confidant—Pérez Molina retired from military service.
In February 2001, Pérez Molina formed the Partido Patriota (Patriot Party, or PP). Briefly, and perhaps a touch ironically given subsequent events, he also found common cause with Colom's UNE as they jointly denounced Portillo's alleged abuse of power. Later, however, the PP was incorporated into the Gran Alianza Nacional (Great National Alliance, or GANA) coalition of the eventual winner (and Colom opponent) in the 2003 presidential elections, Óscar Berger. In those same elections, Pérez Molina was elected as a deputy to Guatemala's congress for the coalition.
In the 2007 general elections, one of the bloodiest ballots in Guatemala's history with over 50 candidates and activists slain, Pérez Molina ran against Álvaro Colom for the presidency, a ballot that he lost despite his advocacy of a mano dura (strong hand) policy against the country's criminals. During the trajectory of Pérez Molina's political life, both his son and daughter have been the victims of non-fatal attacks by gunmen, and at least eight members of the PP have been slain.
Over the years, however, security analysts and Guatemalan government officials say that Promotion 73 took on another, shadowy, but far more violent, role—that of El Sindicato. The syndicate immediately took its place as one of Guatemala's most powerful clandestine groups, and one whose struggle against La Cofradía must be understood in order to grasp the nature of the country's current demons.
Politics by Other Means
One of the most destructive influences on Guatemala's fragile state appears to have been the rise of the FRG party throughout the 1990s. Founded by former dictator Efraín Rios Montt in 1989, the FRG melded a virulent hatred of Guatemala's traditional economic elite with populist economic and social rhetoric that attempted to cast it as the voice of Guatemala's disenfranchised. This stance was especially ironic given the ghastly human rights abuses against Guatemala's indigenous population that were the hallmark of Rios Montt's tenure as president and the strong element of current and former military officials in the party's ranks.
In 1999, Alfonso Portillo, a former university professor who had killed two men during an altercation in Mexico while teaching there in 1982 (a fact he has never disputed), ran for the presidency under the FRG banner and won, ascending to the office the following year. Though Portillo's rhetoric adhered to progressive social-democratic goals, his tenure was marked by a high degree of corruption and political violence.
In 1996, shortly before Portillo attained the presidency, both he and Ortega Menaldo were implicated in a corruption scandal centering around Salvadoran-born Alfredo Moreno Molina. Originally working on counter-insurgency efforts within the Guatemalan military, Molina later was prosecuted for having set up a sophisticated corruption ring known as the Grupo Salvavidas or Lifesaver Group. Ortega Menaldo was subsequently dismissed from the military for his involvement in the affair, and Portillo admitted taking campaign contributions from Moreno. During Portillo's subsequent tenure as president, Ortega Menaldo served as one of his closest advisors. The power of Guatemala's already weak state, which has only 26,000 national police to control a country of some 13 million, eroded still further as the private security sector swelled to 120,000 individuals. A substantial number maintained links to organized crime.
"Before Portillo, these bodies were just giving security to some organized crime groups, but during Portillo they became contractors of the state," says José Carlos Marroquín, who served as chief strategist for Álvaro Colom during his presidential campaign. Eventually, Marroquín resigned, following threats from organized crime. For his efforts at cleaning up Guatemala's political system, Marroquín's Guatemala City home, where he lives with his wife and children, was raked with automatic weapons fire and set ablaze during a 10-minute assault last year.
"I don't measure the state by its size, I measure the state by its strength," continues Marroquín, who also says that clandestine armed groups have an interest in undermining the state. Waves of what would appear to be carefully organized violence would seem to support this. In February 2008, a dozen bus drivers in the capital were slain, while in November of the same year 15 people on a charter bus from Nicaragua were killed execution-style and their bodies set alight after passing into Guatemala.
Only days after turning over power to his elected successor, Óscar Berger, in 2004, Portillo fled to Mexico, where he remained until October 2008 despite a Mexican government order to extradite him back to Guatemala to face corruption charges. That month, Portillo announced that he would no longer fight extradition as he "trusted" the Guatemalan courts under Colom more than he did under Berger. Though rumors swirled that Portillo had helped fund part of Colom's election campaign from exile, none of these charges have been proven.
Though the FRG suffered badly in the 2007 elections, and its influence in Guatemala's congress has significantly diminished, its activities while controlling the presidency and the congress included extending state largess to former members of civil defense patrols formed as a counter-insurgency tool by Rios Montt a quarter century ago. These patrols have been implicated in gross human rights abuses. In today's Guatemala, some of the same regions where those patrols were the strongest, such as the jungle-covered department of El Petén, have now also become centers of illegal drug activity, with some of the same campesinos who once worked for the civil patrols now seizing land and clearing clandestine runways where drug planes can land. On one government map seen by this reporter, there were 31 such runways listed as existing in El Petén alone.
Add to this mix Central America's indigenous street gangs—particularly the MS-18 and MS-13 in Guatemala—and the terrible strains placed on Guatemala's fragile justice system become quite clear. This toxic brew of politicians, organized crime syndicates, street gangs, and foreign cartels, and the seeming inability of the justice system in Guatemala to address it, has led some observers to point to the Guatemalan state itself as part of the problem.
"There have been a number of cases where [the hidden powers] use the gangs as muscle," says a U.S. law enforcement official who has worked on drug trafficking and organized crime in Guatemala for over a decade, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "[But] there is a lack of in-depth investigations by the judicial sector....The Guatemalans have been slow in reacting to the real threat that exists."
Death in the Afternoon
One midday in June 2008, Vinicio Gomez, Álvaro Colom's Minister of Interior and widely regarded as an honest public official, boarded a helicopter piloted by a veteran of DEA missions in Colombia and Panama. Flying through a light rain over the department of Alta Verapaz, Gomez' helicopter crashed, killing him, the pilot, deputy minister Edgar Hernandez, and one other person. Though there was no major storm in the area, the official cause of the crash was attributed to bad weather.
According to a high-ranking official in the Colom government, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, in the months before the crash, Gomez had quarreled violently with Carlos Quintanilla, an associate of Ortega Menaldo who was at the time the head of the Secretaría de Asuntos Administrativos y de Seguridad (Secretariat for Administrative Matters and Security, or SAAS), the successor to the EMP responsible for the president's personal security. Those familiar with the conversation say that Quintanilla was vexed at Gomez's plan to deploy hundreds of troops and anti-drug agents along Guatemala's long border with Mexico, where cartel boss Juan Alberto "Chamalé" Ortiz López is thought to have been the first to use the Mexican Zetas in and around the city of Huehuetenango.
With the death of Gomez—a death that not a single government or civilian official I spoke with in Guatemala believes was an accident—an administration already handicapped in asserting its authority was further weakened. Subsequently, an arrest warrant was issued for Quintanilla, after Colom concluded that the security chief had planted surveillance devices in his home and offices at the behest of organized criminal gangs. Quintanilla has since gone to ground.
"Colom's guys are Ortega Menaldo's guys," says one Guatemalan government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, attempting to explain the Faustian bargain that Colom is said to have made for his own security. "He needed them as protection against Pérez Molina."
Such are the implications of political activity in Guatemala—that a long-time social democrat such as Colom might be forced to form an alliance, however temporary, with figures long rumored to be deeply enmeshed in organized crime. As if the suspicious death of Gomez was not enough, barely two months earlier, Victor Rivera, a Venezuelan citizen who had served as a long-time security advisor to several Guatemalan governments, was slain in a shooting in the capital. Dismissed by Colom only a week before for being "too independent," Rivera, though he denied any wrongdoing, was thought also to have been behind summary executions of suspected gang members throughout his tenure, a reputation that gained him as many admirers as critics in crime-weary Guatemala. This past August, the killing continued with the murder of Rigoberto Cucul, the former FRG-affiliated mayor of El Estor, a city near Morales, who perished in a hail of automatic weapons fire. Police had previously raided his home in search of narcotics but said they found only ammunition.
But perhaps no crime has shaken the foundations of Guatemala and its neighbors in recent years as much as the slaying of three Salvadoran representatives to the Central American Parliament, kidnapped and killed along with their driver, while traveling to Guatemala for a parliamentary meeting in February 2007. The victims included Eduardo Jose d'Aubuisson, the 32-year-old son of Roberto d'Aubuisson, an extreme rightist and founder of El Salvador's ruling ARENA party who died of cancer in 1991. The four bodies were found burned almost beyond recognition on a rural roadside after becoming separated from a larger convoy. It appears that the killings were linked to a power struggle for drug trafficking inside ARENA, though the motive is still murky.
The same month, four policemen being held in connection with the slayings were also murdered when gunmen entered the prison east of Guatemala City, where they were being held. The assassins were able somehow to reach their victims despite having to pass through eight sets of locked doors to get to their cells. And this past July, the judge in charge of investigating the murders was also slain. In September 2008, Guatemalan security forces arrested a former congressman and mayor, Manuel de Jesus Castillo, who is suspected of being one of the masterminds of the crime. Castillo had apparently been hiding in plain sight, living for months in his hometown of Jutiapa despite a January 2008 warrant for his arrest.
Added to the mix has been the curious behavior of the Salvadoran government itself. Despite strong statements from El Salvador's President Tony Saca and his public security minister, Rene Figueroa, that the culprits of the slayings of the parliamentarians must be found and punished, as of yet no investigation into the crime has been opened in El Salvador itself
.
Steps Toward Reform?
One hopeful development in Guatemala's struggle against organized crime has been the creation of the Comisión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala (International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, or CICIG), a United Nations-affiliated body charged with investigating organized crime's links to the state. Operational since the beginning of 2008, under its current mandate, the CICIG has the power to investigate a wide array of violent and organized crime and submit the evidence to Guatemala officials, but not the power to subpoena or indict. Carlos Castresana Fernández, a Spanish magistrate who previously worked for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in the drug-ravaged Mexican state of Nuevo León, and who has a long history of anti-corruption prosecutions in his native country, was appointed to head the body.
"A great problem of impunity exists in this country," Castresana told me in an interview in Guatemala City. "One of the biggest justifications for the creation of this commission is the existence of clandestine security apparatuses [in Guatemala] that have inserted themselves within the state institutions."
While policy makers and law enforcement officials in the United States are largely concentrating their energies on the war going on between narco-traffickers and the government of Mexican President Felipe Calderón, or lauding Colombian President Álvaro Uribe's strides against that country's 40-year-old, drug-financed insurgency, democracy in Guatemala—the most populous country in Central America—is fighting for its life against a rising tide of drug-related violence that has become inextricably linked with the country's political landscape.
The Merida Initiative, a multi-year U.S. proposal aiming to provide equipment, training, reform, and oversight to law enforcement agencies in the region, last year requested an initial $500 million for Mexico and $50 million for all of Central America. During fiscal year 2009, the U.S. government's budget proposal includes $450 million for Mexico and $100 million for Central America.
It is a paltry sum, many Guatemalans feel, given the challenges their nation will confront as it faces down the hidden powers.
"Guatemala is already a weak, almost non-existent, state that does not guarantee security or justice or health or education," says the human rights advocate Frank LaRue. "If the cartels from Mexico begin to move down and Guatemala completely collapses into their hands, then you will have a real problem."
Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The Struggle for Haiti (Seven Stories Press). He last reported for World Policy Journal from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
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