.Guatemala's feared special forces

[Judi Lynn]

.Guatemala's feared special forces
Guatemala's feared special forces
By Lucia Newman in Americas
on Mon, 08/15/2011 - 22:17.

A few days ago, Mexican authorities captured Osvaldo Garcia Montoya, alias El Compayito, one of the most brutal of the new drug lords and the leader of the Hand with Eyes Cartel that operates in Mexico State and parts of Mexico City.

~snip~
What really drew my attention, though, was Garcia Montoya’s background: he was a former Mexican military officer who had been trained in Guatemala at the Kaibil Academy.

The Kaibils are Guatemala’s Special Operations Group, arguably one of the world’s toughest, best trained and most ruthless commando forces.

~snip~
They were formed in the 1970s to combat Guatemala’s leftist insurgency and quickly earned a reputation as killing machines, because of the massacres they carried out against entire villages of mainly Mayan Indian peasants.

More:
http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2011/08/15/guatemalas-feared-special-forces

[bemildred]

1. Government hired killers are so much more worthy than mere gangs.

At least until they start their own businesses.

[Peace Patriot]

2. Why would anyone unrec this? Very odd. As for making sense of our Bushwhacked world,

I have a theory that the Bush Junta was using the U.S. "war on drugs" (billions of our tax dollars) to consolidate the cocaine trade out of Colombia and direct its trillion+ dollar revenue stream to U.S. banksters and other beneficiaries.

For instance, they were using our money infused into the Colombian military to drive FIVE MILLION peasant farmers from their lands--one of the worst human displacement crises on earth. This seems to me far too disruptive to have been about mere land ownership (for instance, giving fat cats big ranches as rewards for political support). A million peasant farmers booted out for such corrupt purposes, maybe--but 5 million? Something else was going on--even more sinister.

Small peasant farmers in Colombia often grow a few coca leaves for local use (traditional Indigenous medicine) along with their food crops and/or to give their meager incomes a tiny boost by selling the leaves to someone who ultimately turns it in cocaine. This dispersed entrepreneurial network has been flourishing in Colombia at least since the U.S. "war on drugs" was announced (Nixon, 1970s), with, of course, increasing organization at the cocaine end of things, with every escalation of the "war on drugs." The bottom rung has been relatively independent tiny farms--poor family farms, food farms--who weren't in it to make a lot of money and become drug lords, but merely to survive. Thus, they are not very efficient at it. They grow a few coca leaf plants and a lot of other things. The U.S. "war on drugs" comes sweeping in--killing people, spraying toxic pesticides on plants, animals and children, drone-bombing alleged FARC guerrilla camps, and grabbing a few youngsters, murdering them and dressing their bodies up like FARC guerrillas (the infamous "false positives" scandal; Colombian military units incentivized to up their "body counts" for bonuses and promotions; object--to terrorize small rural communities). What happens as the result of this? The peasants flee, in the millions--to debased lives in urban areas, or across the border into Venezuela and Ecuador--and prime coca leaf growing lands are freed up for very big cocaine production by drug lords tied to the government and military.

Some 70 of the closest political cohorts of Bush pal, Alvaro Uribe, putative president of Colombia over the last decade, are under investigation or already in jail for ties to the death squads, drug trafficking, illegal domestic spying, bribery, election fraud, land theft, ponzi schemes and other crimes. Uribe has been tied to death squads/drug trafficking from the beginning of his career. I think he's actually a Mob boss who worked his way up, with murder and mayhem, into a position to be noticed by the Bush Junta and assisted in becoming president, where he had all the powers of government--and illicit powers that he added to the powers of government, such as his vast, illegal domestic spying operation--to consolidate the drug trade into fewer hands and direct its revenue stream.

This would explain why the Obama administration has actively protected him from prosecution and has even coddled him and helped him "launder" his image. The Obamaites are obliged to cover up Bush Junta crimes in Colombia. The U.S./Bush Junta was likely using U.S. military assets to commit some of these crimes or to aid and abet them--and Uribe would likely know the details (names, places and the dots connecting them). He was spying on judges and prosecutors, in addition to many others, and was thus able to monitor their investigations and anticipate their moves. That is probably how 30 death squad witnesses were identified for midnight extradition to the U.S. on mere drug charges, which Uribe accomplished with the help of the U.S. ambassador (Wm. Brownfield--Bush appointee). These 30 were then buried in the U.S. federal prison system, by complete sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their vociferous objections. This is a crime in itself--covering up other crimes, interfering with Colombia's justice system. But what were they covering up?

Consolidating the trillion+ dollar cocaine trade out of the Colombia and directing its revenues not only needs a Mob boss as president of Colombia, it needs a lot of Mob lieutenants, in Colombia and elsewhere (all along the cocaine trade route into the U.S.), and former "U.S. Army School of the Americas"-trained killers are perfect candidates for these positions. Thus we have Osvaldo Garcia Montoya from the U.S.-supported military death squads in Guatemala (200,000 Mayan villagers slaughtered with Reagan's smiley-faced support). Uribe supplied some lieutenants directly by placing his cohorts in government positions--for instance, his spy chief Maria Hurtado (fled to Panama; got asylum probably with CIA assistance; wanted by Colombian prosecutors) and his second in command of the spying operation who was just arrested in Colombia. Additional candidates for drug lords and thugs are bred, trained and armed in Colombia, in the rightwing paramilitary groups that have helped rightwing politicians up the political ladder--culminating in Uribe as president--with very close ties to the Colombian military and the government--all supported with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid, and U.S. military personnel and 'contractors' on the ground in Colombia, providing training and technical support and the latest "pacification" plans from the Pentagon and the USAID.

Early this year, the U.S. State Department "fined" Blackwater (aka Xe) for "unauthorized" "trainings" of "foreign persons" IN COLOMBIA "for use in Iraq and Afghanistan." Visible flame of the deep volcano, it seems to me. What was the State Department covering up? (I don't believe the word "unauthorized.")

Iraq: oil. Afghanistan: oil/gas pipeline. Colombia: cocaine. (And don't forget the revival and prosperity of the heroine trade out of Afghanistan.)

U.S. "war on drugs" murder and mayhem does not stop the drug trade. It merely forces the drug trade to become better organized, better armed and more brutal, as the bigger operations break up and swallow up the smaller ones and become veritable armies. The Bush Junta, in my opinion, took this one step further, or, rather, turned the whole thing inside out--creating murder and mayhem deliberately TO consolidate and profit from the trade. I think this is what is going on on the Mexican border and has been going on in Colombia (and puts a whole new light on the rightwing coup in Honduras as well).

We are seeing little eruptions of this volcano nearly every week--this shoot out, that shoot out, this arrest, that arrest, this scandal, that scandal, puzzling items like the 30 extradited death squad witnesses, or Uribe teaching at Harvard and Georgetown, or the secret U.S./Colombia military agreement giving all U.S. military personnel and all U.S. military 'contractors' "total diplomatic immunity" in Colombia (also concocted by Uribe and Brownfield)--but no one has (and possibly no one can) put it all together.

I'm taking a shot at it, just based on what we can see.

What DIDN'T the Bush Junta corrupt--from the Pentagon (billions gone missing in Iraq), to FEMA and the banking regulation system, from the use of the U.S. war machine to control part of the world's oil supply (after slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent people) to putting Bible college students in charge of "reconstruction" in Iraq and refining the Air Force's latest tech gadgetry by experimenting on Afghan civilians?

It makes terrifying sense that they would also corrupt the U.S. "war drugs"--which has always been a war profiteer boondoggle anyway, but needed more 'focus" to rake in not just boondoggle military contracts but the cocaine revenue stream itself.