Guatemala Bleeds in Vise of Gangs and Vengeance

Guatemala Bleeds in Vise of Gangs and Vengeance
By GINGER THOMPSON
Published: January 1, 2006

GUATEMALA CITY - There were 52 new bodies at the morgue on a recent Monday morning; 52 new chances for Guadalupe Díaz to find her son, Mario Toscano.

He was no angel, Ms. Díaz said of her son. The 20-year-old Mr. Toscano, known around the neighborhood as Chespy, was the leader of the violent Mara 18 street gang. And his mother long feared he might wind up dead, but not disappeared.

Mr. Toscano has been missing since Aug. 27, Ms. Díaz said, when he was abducted at a convenience store by three gunmen. Ms. Díaz said that when neighbors tried to intervene in the kidnapping, the gunmen pulled out their weapons, identified themselves as police officers, warned the neighbors to move back, then loaded Mr. Toscano into an unmarked car and drove away.

Since then, Ms. Díaz, a maid, stops at the morgue on her way to work almost every Monday.

"To see them," she said of examining so many dead bodies, "I get chills."

A neighbor named Rosa Morales, 71, said her 15-year-old grandson, who was not a member of a gang, was kidnapped by the same kind of mob two months ago. When asked who she thought was responsible for the attacks, she raised an evil from the past.

"The people say it's the death squads that are disappearing the people," Ms. Morales said, sobbing. "What gives them the right?"

Nearly a decade after the end of a civil war that left 200,000 people dead or missing in this country of 14 million people, a new wave of violence has hit Guatemala and it looks a lot like the old one - some say worse. Guatemalan authorities said an estimated 4,325 people were killed in the first 10 months of 2005. That is one of the highest per capita murder rates in Latin America, and far more than the average annual killings in the last decade of this country's armed conflict.

Even in peace, governments across Central America have said violence remains the principal threat to stability. Here, as in neighboring Honduras and El Salvador, the violence comes with many of the trademarks of the cold war: rape, torture and extrajudicial kidnappings and killings. And now, as they did then, human rights investigators have raised concerns about a clandestine "social cleansing campaign," led by rogue police officers and vigilante mobs.

This latest cycle of violence began five years ago, when street gangs with roots in Los Angeles - especially the Mara 18 and the Mara Salvatruchas, known as MS-13 - began to spread across Central America and southern Mexico, creating the same kind of havoc in poor neighborhoods here as they once did in places like Compton and Watts.

Then in the past year, men and boys suspected of being members of street gangs began to disappear in much the same way people suspected of being guerrillas did during the 1980's: abducted from busy streets or ambushed in their beds, and forced into unmarked cars with tinted windows and no license plates.

Almost none of the kidnapped turn up alive. Some never turn up at all. When they do, they are often not found in one piece.

Beyond the attacks against gang members and youths suspected of being gang members, international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have expressed concern about a disproportionate increase in the killing of women. The Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman reported that from 2002 to 2004, killings of women increased by almost 57 percent, while the killings of men increased 21 percent.

Adriana Beltran of the Washington Office on Latin America said many of the killings were committed with unusual cruelty, involving the kind of rape and mutilations that occurred during this country's armed conflict.

"This is a society that is rotten from the head down," said Jairo González, 47. His daughter, Flor, a university student in graphics design, was abducted one night in July and found raped and shot to death the next morning.

"The criminals have the arms," he said. "They have the money. They have the power. The people have no power to fight back. Millions stay silent, because of impunity."

The people of La Esperanza, Spanish for hope, live at the center of the storm.

"On June 16, they found a head in a bucket right there," said Elubia Velásquez, pointing toward a tortilla shop while walking along the main street of La Esperanza. "The hands were found near a light pole where you met me this morning. And farther down that way, under the bridge at Búcaro, they found the body."

Ms. Velásquez, born and reared in La Esperanza, said the neighborhood was once terrorized by the Mara 18. She said the gang members demanded so-called war taxes from all the merchants, bus drivers and delivery crews and killed several people who refused to pay. The gang members, she said, had also raped dozens of girls, robbed countless homes and turned schoolchildren into drug addicts.

In the past year, however, she said, most of the gang members were either dead or in hiding.

The leader of the Mara 18 in Villalobos, known as El Quince, Spanish for 15, was abducted a year ago. His body was found a day later, with his hands and feet tied and with several gunshots wounds to the head, Ms. Velásquez said. A gang member known as Gaspar had been strangled, other residents said. He was found with a heavy stone tied with wire around his neck.

The root causes and perpetrators of the violence have been so obscured by government cover-ups and corruption that they are often impossible to identify.

In the cases of the killing of women, for example, fewer than 12 of the more than 1,800 murders since 2001 have been resolved, according to the nonprofit Center for Legal Action on Human Rights.

Relatives of the victims, especially the relatives of dead gang members, said in numerous interviews that they believed that police officers and private security guards had led much of the kidnapping and killing in a secret campaign of state-sponsored "social cleansing," aimed at the young and the poor.

Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann flatly denied those accusations in a recent interview. Unlike the governments in Honduras and El Salvador, which adopted tough laws that made it a felony to belong to a gang, the Guatemalan government has begun a softer war against gangs that focuses on recreation and rehabilitation programs.

Mr. Vielmann said the government had also taken important steps to root out corruption in the police force by punishing dozens of officers responsible for abuses, upgrading equipment and training and cooperating with the United States in vetting a special community policing unit that had had some success at decreasing the violence in a neighborhood with heavy gang activity, Villa Nueva.

Still, Mr. Vielmann acknowledged corruption remained rampant among the officers of the National Civil Police. And he said he suspected that some of the secret security structures created during the civil war had become instruments of organized crime.

The interior minister attributed much of Guatemala's violence to fighting among rival gang members, and he included in that category much of the violence against women, who he said have become increasingly involved in street gangs and dealing dope. But he did not reject the theory that some of the attacks had been committed by rogue police officers and citizen vigilantes, many of them frustrated by the government's inability to deliver justice.

"I am not going to guarantee you that agents of state security forces or of private security forces have not in some moment committed an excess and killed someone," Mr. Vielmann said. "But I can tell you that this is not a policy of the state. And we would never allow this to be the policy of the state."

"There are parallel groups that kill just to destabilize, or create problems for the government," he added. "They kill to kill."

In a crime-plagued neighborhood called El Mezquital, people said some of the killing had brought relief.

Guadalupe del Carmen Alvarado, a resident there, said that after gang members had killed a couple of merchants and bus drivers who had refused to pay war taxes, the other merchants and bus drivers pooled their money to hire gunmen to "eliminate the gangs."

"We don't like to see bad things happen, but to be sincere, when they started to kill the gang members, I gave thanks to God," Ms. Alvarado said. "The gangs are like living with a lion, and we know if we don't kill it, it is going to eat us."

Ms. Velásquez acknowledged that "the gangs made a lot of enemies" in El Mezquital. But she said she worried that innocent youths had fallen victim in the fighting.

"Now it's not only gang members who are disappearing," Ms. Velásquez said. "Now they are taking teenagers who don't have a single tattoo. Being young and poor in neighborhoods like this one has become a crime."

On Oct. 13, three neighborhood teenagers, who residents said were not involved in gangs, were abducted by three men wearing ski masks as the youths played soccer in front of their houses. The victims' bodies were found the next day dumped along a small road about an hour away.

The authorities said the youths appeared to have been strangled. All three were found with their hands and feet tied. Their relatives said the bodies showed signs of torture.

Among them was Ms. Morales's 15-year-old grandson, José Arnoldo Arecis.

"They say a tree that is no good should be cut down," Ms. Morales said, sobbing. "But only God has the right to cut down a man. What is happening here is a sin."

Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press, for The New York Times
At a protest aimed at violence against women, Jairo González holds a banner with a photograph of his daughter, Flor, who was raped and killed.

Rodrigo Abd/Associated Press, for The New York Times
On Mondays, Guadalupe Díaz looks for her son Mario Toscano, a gang leader, at Guatemala City's morgue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/international/01guatemala.html?pagewanted=all

Related Article:

Anti-Drug Forces Follow Traffickers to Sea: Published: December 29, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/international/americas/29guatemala.html
By GINGER THOMPSON

ABOARD U.S.S. GENTIAN, off Guatemala - The Nicaraguan Navy frigate knew nothing about the suspicious fishing boat speeding north along the Caribbean Coast except its menacing name: Chupacabras.

The frigate intercepted the boat, named for a mythical blood-sucking creature, and sent a search team on board, guns drawn. Nicaraguan sailors climbed slowly toward the bridge. Then a gunman sneaked up from behind. Good thing for the sailors, this was only a test.

"Never leave your back uncovered," said the Brooklyn-born instructor, Michael Hernandez. "That's the best way to get killed."

It was a windy December afternoon near Puerto Santo Tomás de Castilla, Guatemala, and the United States Coast Guard was conducting rare joint exercises with navies from across Central America, whose waters have become a principal transshipment route for cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that at least 75 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States passes through some part of Central America, a trend that authorities attribute to tougher enforcement by Mexico and a reduction in resources sent to this region in recent years by the United States.

For example the Petén, the northern rain forest of Guatemala, a rugged and isolated landscape, had been a popular landing area for small planes carrying loads of cocaine, Michael P. O'Brien, of the D.E.A.'s Guatemala office, said in an interview. But, he said, as governments have gotten better at intercepting aircraft, drug shipments have increasingly been moving at sea.

After Guatemala's chief drug enforcement officer was arrested in Virginia in November on trafficking charges, President Óscar Berger publicly acknowledged that his law enforcement agencies and courts were so rife with corruption that he was working on a request for the United Nations to take over prosecutions of organized crime.

But American military authorities in Guatemala said in interviews that they were most interested in helping Central American governments help themselves. They said the best way for this region's ill equipped and poorly financed armies to combat some of the most powerful criminal organizations in the world was to work together. The joint exercise with the Gentian, a Coast Guard cutter, was part of a larger effort by the United States to develop a multinational force to respond to natural disasters and organized crime.

"Bad guys know no borders," said Cmdr. Eduardo Pino, captain of the Gentian. "And if you are talking drug traffickers, you're talking about a wealthy opponent, one that can afford the best equipment and technology."

It has not always been easy, said Capt. Stephen Leslie, of the United States Coast Guard, to bring together nations with histories of border disputes. The Nicaraguans were leery of entering Honduran waters, Captain Leslie said, and Guatemala initially refused to allow entry to Coast Guard boats from Belize.

After months of American pressure, Captain Leslie said, not to mention promises of money for parts and equipment, the countries agreed and held the first joint naval exercises in February and the second in December.

Human rights groups, like the Washington Office on Latin America, have criticized the plan to give Central American militaries, responsible for egregious human rights abuses during the region's civil conflicts, increased law enforcement responsibilities. But leaders of the region's navies dismissed those concerns and said joint military exercises had already begun to pay off.

Capt. Celvin Castro Alvarado, commander of Guatemala's Caribbean Naval Base at Puerto Santo Tomás de Castilla, said that on June 14, Guatemala captured about 3,300 pounds of cocaine after forcing a speedboat to run ashore. The capture, he said, was a result of a joint chase, first by Honduras and then by Belize, which forced the boat into Guatemalan waters.

Capt. Manuel Salvador Mora Ortíz, chief of Nicaragua's Atlantic Naval Command, said his troops had seized nearly 2,000 pounds of cocaine in November from a boat whose captain had claimed to be fishing for lobster.

Still, said Captain Castro, for every boat captured, at least four got away.

"This war is asymmetrical," he said. "What drug traffickers have is a wealth of resources. They have a lot of money. They have advanced radios and guidance systems.

"We have very limited resources. And a lot of our equipment is antiquated."

The traffickers' current boats of choice, authorities said, are known here as go-fasts, 800-horsepower, fiberglass vessels that authorities said can carry loads up to two tons at speeds that reach 70 miles an hour.

"It is a powerful little threat," Captain Leslie said, "because they are fast and hard to see. You can't always see them from an airplane. You can't always see them on radar. And when they're running at top speeds, you can't always catch them."

Mr. O'Brien, of the Drug Enforcement Administration, said, "You may think it's harder to find an airplane, but it's actually much harder to find a boat."

Joint exercises like the one involving the Gentian bring to life the difficulties of intercepting drugs at sea. When the Hondurans had their turn, it was feminine wiles, not weapons, that foiled their efforts.

The captain of the Chupacabras came down from the bridge, pointing a fake automatic rifle. The sailors fired their fake guns. The captain fell. Another gunman approached from the stern. The sailors jumped on top of him, wrestled his gun away and handcuffed him. Then the sailors found a woman hiding in the engine room. They put cuffs on her, but did not close them tight. So she wiggled her hands free, grabbed her gun and shot the sailors.

"The woman always stumps them," Captain Pino said with a smile. "They have a hard time learning that women can be just as dangerous as men."

Pic: Daniel LeClair for The New York Times
In training to intercept drug traffickers, Nicaraguan coast guardsman hold a "prisoner" and search his ship.

Pic: Daniel LeClair for The New York Times
A Honduran coast guardsman, part of a team from Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras that trained this month with the United States Coast Guard off Puerto Santo Tomás de Castilla, Guatemala.

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World Briefing | Americas: Guatemala: Court Voids War Crimes Trial (February 5, 2005)
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E2D9113BF936A35751C0A9639C8B63&fta=y

The Constitutional Court, Guatemala's highest, has pulled the plug on a landmark war-crimes trial against soldiers accused of the mass killing of hundreds of civilians in a jungle village 23 years ago, court officials said. The court ruled that 16 soldiers accused of killing 226 unarmed civilians in the village of Dos Erres in 1982 at the height of Guatemala's 36-year civil war should be exempt from prosecution.
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