Perez looks to combat drug cartels with “Mano Dura”
By KARL PENHAUL
Channel: Politics, Drug Trafficking
Cobán, Guatemala – He strides through the crowd shaking hands, crouching to kiss a baby he calls “nena” and saluting when a supporter shouts out “my general”.
Clenched fists pummel the air. At this rally, indigenous and mixed-race Guatemalans are chanting for “mano dura” – Spanish for “strong hand” – the center-piece policy of presidential frontrunner, retired General Otto Perez Molina.
If rightist Perez wins the Sept.11 presidential elections, as Guatemalan opinion polls broadly predict, this veteran of Guatemala’s brutal civil war knows that the real fight will have just begun.
Guatemala is awash in South American cocaine heading north to the United States. And Mexico’s bloodiest drug cartel, the “Zetas”, is now fighting a war on Guatemalan turf to subjugate home-grown narcos and establish a choke hold over smuggling routes.
Photo by Carlos Villalon exclusive for Univision
“Narco-traffickers have begun to occupy parts of the country. Whole pockets of territory are being controlled by them,” Perez told Univision on the sidelines of a four-city campaign tour at the weekend.
“I think this election is a very important decision for Guatemalans. Either we confront the grave problems threatening us or we allow drug trafficking to continue growing,” added Perez, a graduate of the School of the Americas, the United States’ now notorious counterinsurgency training academy.
Perez’s first stop Sunday was Coban. Guatemalan security forces say the city of around 140,000 inhabitants has become “headquarters” for the Zetas, the hit-squad that splintered from Mexico’s Gulf Cartel in early 2010.
One of the most horrific incidents here was the kidnapping and beheading of an assistant public attorney in May. Police say the killers left a message – signed “Zeta 200” – accusing the attorney of collaborating with U.S. anti-drug agencies.
There was no overt sign of cartel activity in Coban at the weekend. The streets were thronged with several thousand of Perez’s supporters dressed partly in bright orange – the campaign colors of Perez’s Patriotic Party (Partido Patriota) – and partly in the traditional clothing of the regions Q’eqchi indians.
Photo by Carlos Villalon exclusive for Univision
There was no sense of imminent threat either among Perez’s low-profile security detail. His bodyguards appeared to be packing only pistols concealed under street clothes and the entourage traveled in pick-up trucks with no armor-plating.
Perez knows though he could become a target.
“We know our message that we will confront narco-trafficking and organized crime has not been well received in those circles. We know it will be hard but we’re determined,” he said.
Law enforcement officials say between as much as 350 and 400 tonnes of cocaine floods through Guatemala every year, mostly from Colombia en route to the United States.
The Guatemalan police and army, working closely with the DEA have arrested a handful of suspected traffickers this year and are offering rewards of up to $200,000 for local kingpins.
Cocaine seizures this year so far stand at about 2.5 tonnes of cocaine – a tiny fraction of the total. But Guatemalan police estimate they have seized more than $3 billion in cartel assets, ranging from drug consignments, to cash, vehicles and weapons.
Steven Dudley, director of the U.S.-based anti-organized crime think-tank Insightcrime.org, believes the winner of the September presidential elections will inherit a wrecked nation.
“The next president will inherit a government that is rotting from the core, divided and weak. It is, in many ways, already a criminal state. Each criminal enterprise seeks to control the piece of the government that is important for their business, be it fake passports, illegal adoptions, human smuggling or drug trafficking,” Dudley told Univision.
Photo by Carlos Villalon exclusive for Univision
He said the Zetas were pushing into Guatemala in a bid to exert tighter control over the cocaine distribution chain and fix market prices as drugs head to the U.S..
Like any criminal mob, the Zetas may be looking to diversify.
“The Zetas incursion into Guatemala is serious. This is not just about moving illegal drugs anymore. It’s about controlling every criminal enterprise, from kidnapping to piracy to illegal drugs using military tactics and psychological operations,” Dudley said.
While much of the focus is on the Zetas in the central and Peten jungle regions of Guatemala, law enforcers warn Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel is shipping even more cocaine via Guatemala’s Pacific coast in fishing vessels, go-fast boats and narco-submarines.
Wracked by organized crime, a weak state and rampant corruption, some political analysts and security experts warn Guatemala could be on the verge of becoming Central America’s first narco-state.
But Oscar Vasquez, director general of anti-corruption watchdog Accion Ciudadana, does not believe the cartels have any interest in running the nation of 14 million.
“Organized crime doesn’t want to take control of the state but actually wants the protection of the state. It’s a perverse alliance,” he told Univision. Vasquez sees corruption as the main threat.
“There are two kinds of state. One where corruption is marginal and one where corruption is systemic. I would say corruption in Guatemala is endemic. Corruption oils the system. Thanks to corruption, the system works and politicians are the cogs in that system,” he said.
Vasquez said his organization, a unit of Berlin-based Transparency International, has no specific evidence drug money has filtered into the presidential campaigns.
But Accion Ciudadana has calculated the leading political parties have exceeded the legal campaign financing threshold of about $7 million by as much as 300 or 400 percent. That makes tracking the source of political financing almost impossible, Vasquez says.
A source in the administration of center-left President Alvaro Colom, who did not wish to be named, said a government study suggested cash from the drug cartels had been filtering into the campaigns of the leading political parties, including Perez’s. He did not specify how much.
Back on the campaign trail, Gen. Perez disagrees. He says his party has set up a finance team to check out campaign donors and their source of income.
Those who spent long hours bussing in for political rallies in Coban and in the mountain communities of Santa Cruz de Quiche and Quetzaltenango over the weekend, see Perez as Guatemala’s savior-in-waiting.
Perez’s speeches to the crowds were pockmarked with bursts from his campaign jingle “strong hand, head and heart”. That was the cue for men, women and even babes-in-arms to punch the air.
Photo by Carlos Villalon exclusive for Univision
But he has many detractors. Some point to U.S. diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks even though these contain no firm evidence of wrongdoing.
A missive written by then U.S. Ambassador to Guatemala James Derham contains a report of denials by Perez that he was receiving funds from Guatemala’s Mendoza crime family during his failed 2007 presidential bid.
Earlier this year, Spain’s El Pais newspaper published what it purported was a more recent U.S. Cable from February 2010, which included outgoing U.S. Ambassador Stephen McFarland’s assessment that Perez was “no babe in the woods”.
But the cable stated that diplomats had found no evidence that Perez had committed human rights abuses during Guatemala’s 1960-1996 civil war.
“Perez Molina is no babe in the woods…Opponents exhaustively reviewed his human rights record in the course of the 2007 presidential campaign and were never able to develop evidence of wrongdoing,” the purported cable published by El Pais said.
Photo by Carlos Villalon exclusive for Univision
During Sunday’s campaign tour, Perez stopped at a soccer stadium in Santa Cruz de Quiche, the department where he was based in 1982 and 1983 at the height of the war against leftist guerrillas.
Perez was an army major in a paratroop unit participating in “Plan Sofia”, a counterinsurgency offensive that included relocating civilians into Vietnam-style “strategic hamlets” to undermine grassroots support for the guerrillas.
Guatemala’s truth commission – the Commission for Historic Clarification — has catalogued scores of cases of massacres of civilians in Quiche in 1982 and 1983. Perez’s name also appears in a couple of military after-action reports included in a judicial review of Plan Sofia but there is no mention of massacres. [http://www.sepaz.gob.gt/media/publicaciones/operacion_sofia.pdf]
Perez has not been formally accused of any crimes and he characterizes the accusations as a smear campaign by political opponents.
“They didn’t find anything and will find absolutely nothing because I have nothing to hide. In the armed conflict I can hold my head high and say I fought for the people and did not violate any human rights,” Perez said.
At his final weekend campaign stop in Guatemala’s second-largest city, Quetzaltenango, supporters that Perez would secure victory in the first round of voting on September 11.
But for anti-corruption crusader Vasquez, Guatemala stands at a crossroads. It’s no longer a question of who wins or loses the next election. He is convinced Guatemala’s political system is irretrievably broken.
“The only thing you can really hope for here is something like in the movie ‘Matrix’,” Vasquez said. “You have to hope a politician comes to power who understands the system but then unplugs it.”
Follow Karl Penhaul on Twitter: @karlpenhaul
Follow Carlos Villalon on Twitter: @Villaloncarlos
