Drug War Capitalism (32 page)

Oil is only one of the super-profitable industries in Guatemala. The Cuatro Balam project proposes biofuels and large-scale agriculture in the south of Petén as well as increased spending on infrastructure for mass tourism, partially funded by groups such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Corporate-linked conservation groups, like the New York–based Wildlife Conservation Society, continue to claim vast tracts of land as park
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There is also the threat of new hydroelectric projects, four of which are proposed along the Usumacinta River, which activists say would flood 35,000 people off their land. Few, if any, of the profits from these illicit or licit economic activities will ever make it to Petén’s poor majority. They remain the most likely to be displaced from the land they depend on for survival, and they are the most likely to lose friends and loved ones as the drug war escalates in Guatemala.

US Marines, Beyond Mérida

In August, 2012, 200 US Marines were stationed in Guatemala as part of the war on drugs.[7] The deployment of US combat troops to Guatemala was part of Operation Martillo, a military plan meant to disrupt cocaine trafficking routes that pass through Central America from Colombia to the United States. “We have the sense that [fighting narcotrafficking] is a pretext to return to the level of military deployment that was maintained during the height of the armed conflict, which resulted in acts of genocide,” said Hernández Batres. The Guatemalan army was called upon to fight drug trafficking in early 2012. “Today, publicly, I want to lay out for the army an important goal of collaborating, coordinating, and cooperating with other security institutions, and that is to put an end to the external threats and contribute to neutralizing illegal armed groups by means of military power,” said Otto Pérez Molina, following his inauguration as president of Guatemala in January 2012.[8] Pérez Molina, a former general and head of army intelligence, promised to increase military spending, and so far, he’s kept his promise. According to
Plaza Pública
, a Guatemalan investigative journalism outlet, spending on military and security equipment in 2013 surpassed all such spending between 2004 and 2012.[9]

The arrival of US Marines to Guatemala in 2012 represents more than a military maneuver to disrupt drug trafficking. It demonstrates that in allied countries like Guatemala, the United States can champion a military invasion under the discourse of the war on drugs with little fanfare or criticism. The deployment of troops to Guatemala is arguably the most blatant example of an evolving military strategy that the US military establishment is betting on in order to continue to exercise control within a framework of democracy and law and order. “The predominant hemispheric security challenges no longer stem principally from state-on-state conflict, right-wing paramilitaries, or left-wing insurgents,” reads the US Western Hemisphere Defense Policy Statement, released in October 2012. “Today’s threats to regional peace and stability stem from the spread of narcotics and other forms of illicit trafficking, gangs, and terrorism, the effects of which can be exacerbated by natural disasters and uneven economic opportunity.”[10]

Guatemala, and Central America as a whole, is a testing ground for one iteration of the US military’s evolving strategy of control, which is being applied unevenly throughout the hemisphere. In Guatemala, it includes US combat troops—something the United States can’t get away with in Mexico, whose constitution explicitly forbids foreigners from carrying weapons. Like Mexico, anti-drugs efforts in Guatemala also include the involvement of military officials from Canada, Chile, and Colombia as trainers in regional security matters.[11]

While Mexico has been a central focus for US anti-narcotics funds and media attention, its neighbors to the south have already seen their share of action. The deployment of US Marines to Guatemala came just three months after a massacre of civilians in Ahuas, Honduras, when a US-backed anti-drug effort there went awry. In an incident we’ll examine in the next chapter, human rights groups say DEA agents were present when Honduran police shot from State Department helicopters, killing four Indigenous people in the country’s northwest in May 2012. [12] “The aircraft that were used in that operation were at that time piloted by officials of the Guatemalan Army,” said Hernández. “Later, [Operation Martillo] appeared publicly in Guatemala, getting its official start midway through this year, but the operations had already begun.” According to official sources, between July and October 2012, members of the US Marine Corps Forces, South—the naval component of the US Southern Command—flew helicopters destined for trafficking interdiction efforts in Guatemala out of Santa Elena, Petén. They also flew aircraft out of La Aurora in Guatemala City, Retalhuleu, and Puerto San José, as well as coordinating with the Guatemalan Navy in Puerto Quetzal, on the Pacific coast.[13]

Beyond a handful of wire stories, news of the deployment of active-duty US combat troops in Guatemala made barely a blip in the media.[14] It also seemed to go largely unnoticed in the Central American nation itself. Few outside military and security research circles were aware of the details of the agreement between the US Embassy and Guatemala’s Foreign Relations Ministry. Nineth Montenegro, second vice president of Guatemala’s Congress, said she found out about the operations through reports in the newspaper. “I found out through the print media, here in Congress there was no request to permit the transit of troops, maybe because they were not troops, maybe because they’re unarmed, maybe because they’re coming, in effect, to help support [the fight] against organized crime, a scourge that is killing our country.… There was no discussion in Congress. It was an agreement [made by the executive] that the president approved.… Some here think there was a violation, because legislative power is independent and it is the only one which can authorize the arrival of troops or military or support, but it never went to Congress,” she said in an interview in Guatemala City.

Instead of moving through constitutional channels, on July 16, 2012, the US Embassy in Guatemala delivered a verbal note to the Minister of Foreign Relations, proposing the conditions for the regularization of US defense personnel in Guatemala. The note from the embassy, which was later transcribed and published in Guatemala’s congressional gazette, makes reference to military and aviation cooperation agreements signed between the two countries in 1949, 1954, and 1955.[15] Castillo Armas, the military dictator who took power after the coup against President Árbenz in 1954, signed one of the documents referenced in the agreement. Such references make it clear that the legal elements permitting present-day US military engagement in Guatemala were created in the wake of the coup in 1954, and have been maintained ever since.

The day after it received the request from the US embassy, the Guatemalan government responded in the affirmative. While researching in Guatemala City
,
I obtained the exchange of notes between the US and Guatemala that legalized the presence of US troops and private security contractors hired by the US Department of Defense in Guatemala for 120 days, beginning July 17, 2012.[16] The agreement allows US personnel to carry arms, to import and export goods without inspection or taxation by the Guatemalan government, to freely transit into, out of, and throughout the country without interference by the Guatemalan government, and to make free and unlimited use of radio frequencies.[17] US soldiers and contractors are granted immunity from prosecution in Guatemala should injury or death of civilians or military personnel result from the operation.

According to members of the US Navy, their mission in Guatemala, led by the Joint Interagency Task Force South out of Key West, Florida, represents a move back to what the organization has traditionally done in the region. “For decades, the Marine Corps has supported engagement in Central and South America with the intent of building partnership capacity and improving interoperability,” wrote Captain Greg Wolf on the Marine Corps official website. “In recent years, though, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have curtailed some of that engagement. The Marines of Detachment Martillo relished the opportunity to partner with Guatemalan authorities and strengthen ties in the region.”[18] According to New York University professor Greg Grandin, whose book
Empire’s Workshop:
Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Empire
documents the US military’s shift from Vietnam and South Asia to Central America in the late 1970s, the discourse of the US military today masks a continued attempt to control local armies and police.

“We’ve come a long way from the robust language of the cold war—which hailed Latin American death squads and dictators as ‘freedom fighters’ on the frontline of a global anticommunist crusade—to the anodyne babble of ‘building partnership capacity and improving inter-operability,’” wrote Grandin in an email interview
.
“But basically the goal has remained the same, to coordinate the work of national security forces on an international level subordinated, either directly or indirectly, to Washington’s directive.” That said, Grandin thinks the reach of the US in the hemisphere has shrunk, making the importance of what takes place in countries like Honduras and Guatemala even greater. “What is different is the degree that the US’s reach has been reduced, from all of Latin America to basically a corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. But even there, US’s hegemony is threatened by a degree of independence that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier, whether it be in Juan Manuel Santos’ Colombia or Daniel Ortega’s Nicaragua.”

The steadfast allegiance displayed by the government of Guatemala toward Washington, as well as the presence of US troops in Guatemala—both overt and clandestine—has a strong historical precedent. In 1960, the CIA coordinated directly with Guatemala’s right-wing president José Miguel Ramón Ydígoras Fuentes, who offered support for the Bay of Pigs invasion against Fidel Castro in Cuba. According to declassified CIA documents, “Not only did Guatemala sever official relations with Cuba, but before the end of February 1960, President Ydígoras offered the use of his territory to support propaganda activities directed against Castro; and he also made a special offer through the CIA ‘to groups favorably regarded by us [of] training facilities in the Petén area of Guatemala.’”[19] The US continued to be openly involved in all manner of military operations in Guatemala through to 1978, when official military aid to Guatemala was cut off by US Congress after evidence of massacres, rapes, and disappearances by the army became insurmountable. US assistance to the Guatemalan army has come in the form of supports for anti-narcotics initiatives, including the Central America Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), a nearly $642 million program, which started in 2008 under the Mérida Initiative and continued to 2014, with assistance, equipment, and training going to Central American police and armies.

Mexico falls under the jurisdiction of the US Northern Command, but south of its borders, it is the US Southern Command, which operates from a $400 million headquarters just west of Miami, that is responsible for all US military activities in Central and Latin America.[20] The presence of US troops in Guatemala is ongoing. For example, the “US Southern Command-sponsored, joint foreign military interaction/humanitarian exercises” named Beyond the Horizon took place in Honduras and Guatemala, ending two days before US Marines were deployed to Guatemala for Operation Martillo in July 2012.[21] Two days after Operation Martillo troops left the country, members of the United States Navy construction battalions deployed to Cobán as part of a “theater security cooperation mission” with the Guatemalan army.[22] But there is a new twist to the engagement of US Marines in Guatemala for Operation Martillo. “This is the first Marine deployment that directly supports countering transnational crime in this area, and it’s certainly the largest footprint we’ve had in that area in quite some time,” Marine Staff Sgt. Earnest Barnes told AP shortly after news of the deployment broke in the US.[23]

In an October 2012 speech in Virginia, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta outlined his army’s plan in the face of budget constraints, explaining that rotational deployments and joint exercises with local militaries are to become an increasingly important element of US defense strategy. “We build new alliances, we build partnerships, we build their capacity and capability to be able to defend and provide their own security. So we’re gonna do that. We’re gonna do that in Latin America. We’re gonna do that in Africa. We’re gonna do that in Europe. We’re doing it in the Pacific. Just have a rotational deployment of Marines going into Darwin. We’re gonna develop the same capability in the Philippines. Gonna do the same thing in Vietnam. Gonna do the same thing elsewhere.”[24]

The US-Guatemala military partnership includes a law enforcement role. “The military’s role is not to act as a law enforcement force, but the unfortunate reality is that it has been called upon to deal with this problem on an interim basis in several countries,” said US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs Frank Mora in June of 2012. “When asked to do a job that many of them do not want to do—which is to do law enforcement, like in El Salvador and Guatemala—they have tried to do it the best that they can.”[25] In 2012, using CARSI funds, the US trained 900 Central Americans at the International Law Enforcement Academy in San Salvador—El Salvador’s capital.[26] The connections with Colombia are strong, and have been reinforced by CARSI. In 2013, Brownfield, the US drug war czar in the Western Hemisphere, stated that “right now the Colombian national police is training more police and law enforcement in Central America than all of US law enforcement put together. Now, we support some of it. So in essence it is CARSI funding, Plan Colombia funding, or in some cases, even Mérida funding that does this. And it does it because it is cheaper for us to have the Colombian national police provide this training than us doing it ourselves. Sometimes it is the Colombians themselves providing that training. They are at this point training in four of the seven countries in Central America. They are providing training and support in the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. They are open to further engagement. I actually believe we get excellent value either by Colombians training in third countries or by us bringing law enforcement personnel from those third countries to train in many of the Colombian training institutions that we helped support and set up during Plan Colombia from the year 2000 to 2010.”[27]