Drug War Capitalism (33 page)

One of the least acknowledged difficulties of increasing US support for the Guatemalan armed forces is the role the army has played and continues to play in drug trafficking. The Guatemalan army is widely documented to have been involved in drug trafficking, but that hasn’t stopped the United States from partnering with it and providing it with technology and training aimed at controlling the flow of narcotics. “Evidence from various sources, including information from DEA reports, indicates that beginning in the 1980s, Colombian traffickers gained access to trafficking networks along key routes throughout the south and west of Guatemala,” according to a publicly available research paper prepared by Navy-linked CNA Analysis and Solutions. “These networks were composed of military intelligence officials, their subordinates and former colleagues, and informants and partners—including military commissioners.”[28]

By the mid-1990s, Guatemala’s top drug lord was Byron Berganza, a former soldier whose “profile had risen and his security detail was comprised exclusively of military officials.”[29] At that time, Berganza was also a DEA informant and the local Guatemalan go-between with Colombian and Guatemalan drug trafficking groups. Berganza was extradited to the United States in 2003, opening up new space in the country’s drug transshipment market, which would eventually be filled by members of a handful of powerful Guatemalan families. In 2011, activist and writer Jennifer Harbury said the rising drug violence in Guatemala “is being carried out by military leaders who took their uniforms off after the war, created large mafias to run drugs, and hired and trained gangs such as the Zetas—that’s very well documented—to help them run the drugs.”[30] Little has changed in the three years since. In addition, weapons including rockets and grenade launchers belonging to the Guatemalan military have been found in the hands of Los Zetas members.[31]

It was a former Kaibil (member of Guatemala’s elite special forces) who was accused of directing the single most violent act in Guatemala yet linked to drug trafficking. Hugo Gómez Vásquez was accused of supervising the massacre in Los Cocos, Petén in May 2011.[32] Some Kaibiles trained in the United States, as did some of the original members of the Zetas, who defected from the GAFEs, an airborne unit of Mexico’s elite special forces, in the late 1990s. The Kaibiles also trained the GAFEs, and have been involved in training with US Marines.[33] “It has become normal that when they find an official on active duty among Zetas, or a Kaibil who is still in active service, two or three days go by and the army claims ‘it’s that they deserted,’ but the internal process regarding what discipline was applied, and what disciplinary procedures there are aren’t documented,” said Hernández of SEDEM. Regardless of evidence of collaboration with the Zetas and other drug trafficking groups and a history of participation in massacres, Guatemala’s Kaibiles maintain a privileged relationship with the US military.

Then there is the role of US troops in Guatemala. “These guys, the marines, they aren’t just here to control narcotrafficking, but to train the Guatemalan military for what I call the continuation of the Cold War,” said Ba Tiul. “A cold war that’s more refined, more academic, more intellectualized, if you’d like. But one that will be just as brutal and damaging for all of us here in Guatemala, and which I don’t think … I don’t think is destined only for Guatemala.” Beyond his connections with an influential elite connected to the extractive industries and the energy sector, there are also important links between Pérez Molina’s government and a powerful sector of organized crime.

“Fernández Ligorría, a military man from Cobán, was one of the most important figures in the Patriot Party, and was very close to the current president, Otto Pérez Molina,” according to a Guatemalan analyst who requested anonymity out of fear for his safety. Ligorría was an instructor to the Kaibles, a former chief of national defense, and later the head of the national police (PNC).[34] Sylvia Gereda Valenzuela, who is closely linked to one of Guatemala’s most powerful families (the Novella family, owner of Cementos Progreso, which has a monopoly on cement in Guatemala), links Ligorría to various organized crime activities, as well as drugs and arms trafficking beginning in the mid-1990s. By the time of his death in January 2011, various media outlets described Ligorría as the head of Los Zetas in Guatemala. “One of his sons, José Fernández Chanel, is currently a sitting congressperson with the [Patriot Party]. It’s complicated, because a direct fight [against drug trafficking] on the part of the government would implicate their own colleagues, ex-colleagues, and high ranking military officials,” said the Guatemalan analyst. “This could unleash wars of another kind, power disputes that could put at risk not only the stability of the government of Pérez Molina, but also the stability of the state itself.”

Military personnel from Cobán make up an important part of Pérez Molina’s support base. Cobán is in the department of Alta Verapaz, where former president Colom also declared a state of emergency in 2010, allegedly because of the presence of Zetas there. For all the talk of a new strategy in the drug war, on March 30, 2012, the Guatemalan defense minister announced the creation of a new, anti-narcotics military task force called “Tecun Uman,” which will benefit from technical and financial assistance from the United States.[35] Four days later, on April 3rd, US officials and Guatemalan authorities captured Horst Walter Overdick Mejía, a drug trafficker affiliated with the Zetas who was active in Alta Verapaz and Petén, in Guatemala.[36] “After Overdick’s arrest, the narcos began to reposition, and the Zetas as well, under the careful and close watch of the military,” said Ba Tiul. “It’s not about controlling the narcos, but ensuring the business stays in their hands … as well as controlling social mobilization, which is very powerful.”

As explored previously, after more than a decade as a testing ground for a US drug policy that has victimized millions, Colombia has the fastest growing economy in Latin America. The hard lesson from Colombia is that, unfortunately, drugs and oil do mix. “We need to keep in mind that Colombian president Santos, like Pérez Molina, wants to expand Plan Colombia, which doesn’t just mean strengthening the fight against narcotrafficking but actually means converting it into a form of paramilitarism in order to generate a new kind of counterinsurgency—not against social movements but against Indigenous communities,” said Ba Tiul. “It’s the remilitarization of Guatemala as a patriotic project.”

Chapter 8:
Drug War Capitalism In Honduras

Honduras is a place where the gap between the tiny elite and the poor majority is so great that it is almost invisible on the street level. The rich simply do not walk around or go out in the same neighborhoods as the poor. I traveled to Honduras from Guatemala to cover the 2013 elections, and kept a diary of what I saw on my first day in the country. After a long process of passport stamping, the bus I was on crossed the border, and immediately there was a banana truck that had burst a tire; green bananas were spilled all over the road. As soon as I arrived at San Pedro Sula, I spied four military police, toting modern automatic weapons and looking at cell phone cases in the bus station. From there, I caught a shared cab downtown for about $4, made my way to a hotel with a window out onto the street and a whirring fan to fight the intense humidity. Down the street, the Despensa Familiar (Walmart) featured a little corner with slim pickings of fruit and vegetables. Most of the store was junk food and processed food wrapped in plastic. It struck me that the baby formula is kept under lock and key at the front of the store, so that parents who worry about feeding their babies enough protein won’t steal. There were at least eight people in the four-block walk back to the hotel looking through garbage, sorting, carrying garbage bags. By nightfall, most places downtown were closed and few people were out on the streets. At dawn, from my hotel window, I noticed a man cooking over a garbage fire. All of this was taking place downtown in San Pedro Sula, Honduras’s second largest city, at the heart of the region considered the industrial belt of the country.

Violence in Honduras is sometimes presented as random and wanton, or as somehow involving drugs, but it can’t be separated from the acute poverty imposed on the country’s majority. The war on drugs is the government’s latest justification of extreme violence in Honduras. It cannot be a surprise that the drug war is providing useful cover for Honduras’ skyrocketing murder rate following the 2009 coup d’état, and according to one of the country’s most respected activists, its designs go beyond Honduras’s borders. “In reality this is a dangerous pretext because it means that territories are occupied and human rights are violated, and of course it guarantees the pillage and appropriation of the common goods of nature by the United States, which is exactly why they’re here, and of course for the geopolitical interests, because Honduras has a particular, privileged location between two oceans and with countries like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and in reality the occupation of Honduras is to help impede the advance of emancipatory processes throughout the continent,” said Berta Cáceres, General Coordinator of the Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH).

The US-backed war on drugs picked up in Honduras when the United States began renewed anti-drugs funding in Central America in 2008 via the Mérida Initiative. The Mérida Initiative was later split, and the Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI) became an independent program in 2010. The program has five overarching goals, which are comparable to those of the Mérida Initiative: to “help make streets safer, disrupt criminal networks, support the development of strong government institutions, bring services to at-risk communities, and promote greater collaboration among the region’s governments, not only within Central America but with Mexico, with Colombia, and beyond.”[1] US aid to Honduras climbed from $62 million in 2010 to $90 million in 2012, thanks in large part to increases in Department of Defense spending and CARSI. As elsewhere, the more US aid to the drug war flowed, the higher the murder rate climbed, peaking in 2012 when US aid for the drug war topped out. Under CARSI, “Honduras received $12.1 million in FY2010, nearly $14 million in FY2011, and an estimated $24.8 million in FY2012.”[2] By 2014, CARSI funding had dropped off to zero, and the US directed the majority of $49.3 million in aid to Honduras to development projects.[3]

In the fall of 2012, when Hillary Clinton was still the US secretary of state, she addressed the Central America Citizen Security Meeting and boasted of improvements in the region following an increase in US spending through CARSI. She claimed the homicide rate in Honduras was down 25 percent in the first six months of 2012 compared to the first six months of 2011. “In some communities, we are told that the fear of violence is beginning to fade for the first time in many years,” Clinton said.[4] Whoever was telling the State Department that things were improving was a creative statistician, to put it mildly. The Honduran Observatory on Violence, an organization comprising police, the Attorney General’s Office and the National University of Honduras, recorded 3,594 reports of homicides in the first six months of 2011, compared to 3,614 over the period of 2012.[5] By December, they said that the number of homicides in 2012 was in fact one percent higher than the previous year, at 7,172.[6] Those numbers don’t include many others who are killed in Honduras each year but whose deaths are not classified as homicides, like the 360 people killed in the Comayagua prison fire in 2012. Regardless, the number steadily climbed each year, increasing from 2,155 homicides in 2004 before peaking in 2012.[7] In 2013, the number of homicides fell to 6,747, or about nineteen each day and an average of 563 per month.[8] In 2013, the government changed the system it uses to count murder victims, which has not yet affected the number of dead counted by the observatory, but has already made the Honduran murder rate appear to decrease.

The devastating present-day ramifications of US aid in Honduras, and the link between military assistance and increased insecurity, can best be understood in the context of Honduran history. Washington’s influence in Honduras throughout the twentieth century was primarily devoted to protecting American investors, to building up a transnational faction of the Honduran elite, and to using the country as a staging ground for military attacks on neighboring countries.

US Military History in Honduras

Early US political involvement in Honduras rose with the banana industry, which reached its apex in the 1920s. By way of example, in 1914, John Ewing, a US minister in Tegucigalpa, sent a letter to the US State Department, in which he explained the reach of the United Fruit Company thus: “In order to obtain these concessions and privileges and to secure their undisturbed enjoyment, it [the United Fruit Company] has seen fit to enter actively into the internal policies of these countries, and it has pursued this course so systematically and regularly until it now has its ramifications in every department of the government and is a most important factor in all political movements and actions.”[9] In 1924, a platoon of 200 marines entered Honduras and traveled to Tegucigalpa after civil war broke out between Liberals and Nationalists. The peace treaty between Honduran parties took place under US supervision aboard an American warship.[10]

After 1932, the United States oversaw the seventeen-year dictatorship of General Tiburcio Carías Andino of the Liberal Party. Carías’s strategy against the opposition parties was known as “
encierro
,
destierro y entierro
,” or “round them up, throw them out, and bury them.”[11] Carías “gagged the press and jammed the prisons. He created an institutionalized dictatorship that combined political, military, and economic force.”[12] Turmoil followed, and the military seized power from the National Party in 1956 and governed for one year, until it was replaced by the Liberal presidency of Ramón Villeda Morales.[13] In an agreement “probably underwritten by the United Fruit Company and the US Embassy,” Villeda Morales signed off on giving the military autonomy from civilian control.[14] After paying off a debt to the US in 1953, the Honduran state, through the US Alliance for Progress program, again began to incur foreign debt in 1958. From the 1950s to the 1980s, the US trained at least 1,000 members of the Honduran army and provided $6.4 million in military assistance to the country.[15] By 1965, the military had become Honduras’s “most developed political institution,” controlling the government between 1963 and 1971, and again from 1972 until 1982.[16] The evolution of the Honduran Army is directly linked to US-financed military training and equipment provisions.[17]