A Murder Spree in Central America
Monday, Mar. 05, 2007 By MICA ROSENBERG/GUATEMALA CITY
Just as President Bush plans to visit Central America, the demons of corruption, drug dealing and murder there that have long been kept under wraps, either by official complicity or negligence, are beginning to attract public scrutiny. Eight brazen and grisly murders —three Salvadoran congressmen and their driver, and four Guatemalan policemen —have shaken the two countries' governments and shed light on the criminal underworld operating with impunity from inside police forces.
The scandal began two weeks ago when the bodies of the congressmen, who were representatives to the Central American parliament, and their driver were found bullet-ridden and charred on an abandoned dirt road in Guatemala. Days later, four Guatemalan policemen — including the head of the organized crime investigation unit — were accused of the murders. But before they could be tried for the crimes, the four were assassinated inside their maximum-security prison cell, left face down in a pool of blood, shot with their throats slit. Authorities and opposition politicians in Guatemala say the policemen were part of a group operating within Guatemala's security forces who were responsible for drug trafficking and death-squad style killings. The four were murdered before they could reveal the full extent of their allegedly illegal activities. "They were killed to keep the lid on Pandora's box," said El Salvador's chief of police Rodrigo Avila.
The reputations of the conservative governments of Tony Saca in El Salvador and Oscar Berger in Guatemala, two of Washington's few remaining allies in Latin America, have taken a severe hit. The countries share a southern border and have two of the strongest economies in Central America. Both are members of the Central American Free Trade Agreement and are seen by the U.S. as partners in the war on drugs. Just last fall the Bush Administration nominated Guatemala to take the Latin American seat on the U.N. Security Council as a means of shutting out Venezuela. The U.S. government says the seven-country region, a land bridge between South America and Mexico, has become a major transit route for over 75% of cocaine moving from Colombia up through Mexico and into the U.S. The fallout from the ongoing investigations, now being conducted with the help of U.S. FBI agents, will surely cast a shadow over the visit later this month of President Bush to Guatemala, his second-to-last stop on a five country tour of Latin America.
For Berger, it means a failure of his campaign promise four years ago to clean up Guatemala's politics, notoriously corrupt since the country's 36-year civil war ended a decade ago. During that war, which claimed nearly a quarter-million lives, the Guatemalan military launched a scorched-earth counterinsurgency campaign against leftist guerillas, massacring entire Mayan villages accused of supporting the rebels. Many wartime figures were never prosecuted for their offenses, and human rights groups and the U.N. have warned that former state security forces — laid off after the peace accords mandated a downsizing of the military — could be involved in the drug smuggling rings.
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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1595944,00.html
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