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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 12:56 am
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Results for drug trafficking (guatemala)
2 results foundAuthor: International Crisis Group Title: Guatemala: Drug Trafficking and Violence Summary: The bloody eruption of Mexican-led cartels into Guatemala is the latest chapter in a vicious cycle of violence and institutional failure. Geography has placed the country – midway between Colombia and the U.S. – at one of the world’s busiest intersections for illegal drugs. Cocaine (and now ingredients for synthetic drugs) flows in by air, land and sea and from there into Mexico en route to the U.S. Cool highlands are an ideal climate for poppy cultivation. Weapons, given lenient gun laws and a long history of arms smuggling, are plentiful. An impoverished, underemployed population is a ready source of recruits. The winner of November’s presidential election will need to address endemic social and economic inequities while confronting the violence and corruption associated with drug trafficking. Decisive support from the international community is needed to assure these challenges do not overwhelm a democracy still recovering from decades of political violence and military rule. Gangs and common criminals flourish under the same conditions that allow drug traffickers to operate with brazen impunity: demoralised police forces, an often intimidated or corrupted judicial system and a population so distrustful of law enforcement that the rich depend on private security forces while the poor arm themselves in local vigilante squads. Over the past decade, the homicide rate has doubled, from twenty to more than 40 per 100,000 inhabitants. While traffickers contribute to the crime wave in border regions and along drug corridors, youth gangs terrorise neighbourhoods in Guatemala City. The outrages perpetrated by the most violent Mexican gang, the Zetas – who decapitate and dismember their victims for maximum impact – generate the most headlines. Violent drug cartels, however, are only one manifestation of the gangs and clandestine associations that have long dominated Guatemalan society and crippled its institutions. How to change this dynamic will be one of the most difficult challenges facing the winner of November’s presidential election. Both Otto Pérez Molina and Manuel Baldizón have promised to get tough on criminals, but a hardline approach that fails to include a strategy to foster rule of law is unlikely to yield anything more than sporadic, short-term gains. For decades, the state itself was the most prolific violator of human rights. During the 36-year conflict that ended with the peace accords of 1996, the armed forces murdered dissidents in urban areas and razed villages suspected of harbouring guerrilla forces. Just as Guatemala was recovering from years of political violence, control of the South American drug trade was shifting from Colombia to Mexico. Increased interdiction in the Caribbean, plus the arrest of Colombian cartel leaders, allowed Mexican traffickers to begin taking over drug distribution in the late 1990s. Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s crackdown after 2006 forced traffickers to import increasing amounts of contraband into Central America and then move it north over land. The shipment of more drugs through Central America has had a multiplier effect on illegal activities. Violence is especially intense in coastal and border departments, where traffickers and gangs have diversified into other activities, such as local drug dealing, prostitution, extortion and kidnapping. In some regions, narcotics traffickers have become prominent entrepreneurs, with both licit and illicit businesses. They participate in community events, distribute gifts to the needy and finance political campaigns. Their well-armed henchmen offer protection from other gangs and common criminals. Those who finance opium poppy cultivation provide impoverished indigenous communities with greater monetary income than they have ever known. But these domestic trafficking groups also operate with impunity to seize land and intimidate or eliminate competitors. Local police and judicial authorities, under-resourced and widely mistrusted, offer little opposition. There are signs of progress. The attorney general is reviving long-stalled investigations into past human rights abuses while aggressively pursuing the current threat posed by organised crime. A veteran human rights activist was tapped by the outgoing government to reform the police. The International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-Guatemalan initiative, is pursuing high-profile criminal cases. Donors are financing vetted units, providing new investigative tools and building new judicial facilities. Moreover, over the past year, Central American authorities, with international help, have arrested half a dozen high-level Guatemalan traffickers who are awaiting extradition to the U.S. But ending the impunity that has allowed trafficking networks and other illegal organisations to flourish will require a long-term, multi-dimensional effort. To shore up recent gains and lay the ground work for sustainable reform it is urgent that: •the new president allow Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz to complete her four-year term, fully support Police Reform Commissioner Helen Mack and encourage CICIG’s efforts to pursue high profile cases and build prosecutorial capacity; •political and business leaders work together both to increase government revenues for crime-fighting and social programs and to devise anti-corruption initiatives that will hold officials responsible for their use of public funds; •regional leaders increase cooperation to interdict illegal narcotics shipments and to break up transnational criminal groups through entities such as the Central American Integration System (SICA); •the U.S. and other consuming countries provide financial aid commensurate with their national interest in stopping the drug trade and aimed not just at arresting traffickers but also at building strong, democratically accountable institutions; and •international leaders open a serious debate on counter-narcotics policies, including strategies designed to curtail both production and consumption; it is past time to re-evaluate policies that have failed either to alleviate the suffering caused by drug addiction or to reduce the corruption and violence associated with drug production and trafficking. Details: Bogota; Brussels: International Crisis Group, 2011. 32p. Source: Internet Resource: Latin America Report No. 39: Accessed October 18, 2011 at: http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/latin-america/39%20Guatemala%20--%20Drug%20Trafficking%20and%20Violence.pdf Year: 2011 Country: Guatemala URL: http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/latin-america/39%20Guatemala%20--%20Drug%20Trafficking%20and%20Violence.pdf Shelf Number: 123052 Keywords: Drug CartelsDrug Trafficking (Guatemala)Drugs and CrimeGangsHomicidesOrganized CrimeViolent Crime |
Author: Lopez, Julie Title: Guatemala's Crossroads: Democratization of Violence and Second Chances Summary: This paper is part of the ongoing work of the Latin American Program on citizen security and organized crime in the region and their effects on democratic governance, human rights, and economic development. This work is carried out in collaboration with the Mexico Institute, which has worked extensively on security and rule of law issues in Mexico. Our goal is to understand the sub-regional dimension of organized crime, focusing on the ways in which the countries of the Andean region, Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the United States, and Canada play central and inter-connected roles. This essay represents one of three papers commissioned by the Woodrow Wilson Center on the nature and dynamics of organized crime in Central America and its connections to broader criminal networks in Mexico and the Andean region. This paper, along with the others in this series, is a working draft. The State of Guatemala is embarked in two wars. On the one hand, it’s fighting organized crime; on the other, it’s at war with itself. While significant portions of its resources are used to fight drug trafficking and extortions, and an explosion of other organized crime activities, the State seems to be imploding from corruption and insufficient professional personnel in the public sector. After a 36-year internal conflict, this stage in Guatemala’s history is often desceribed as the key time to decipher the origin of the country’s current maladies. But the answer is not so clear cut. Security and political analysts attribute the proliferation of organized crime to the Intelligence Structures and Clandestine Security Apparatuses (CIACS, their acronym in Spanish) that were not dismantled after the peace accords were signed. They also attribute it to scores of men left unemployed after the end of the conflict, whose main skill was knowing how to fire a gun. The origin of organized crime and the elements contributing to its growth are broad and complex. Criminal structures can be seen as a three-legged stool, where the three legs are the local crime lords or capos, foreign criminal networks, and local corrupt authorities—which, throughout history, have involved civilians and the military. Some analysts trace the first signs of these structures back to the 1940s, beginning with the strengthening of local criminal networks that worked with foreign contacts on a regional level. Other origins are traced backed to contraband networks dating back to colonial times and the 18th century. Details: Latin American Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2010. 59p. Source: Working Paper Series on Organized Crime in Central America: Internet Resource: Accessed March 13, 2012 at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Lopez.Guatemala.pdf Year: 2010 Country: Guatemala URL: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Lopez.Guatemala.pdf Shelf Number: 124470 Keywords: Corruption (Guatemala)Drug Trafficking (Guatemala)Law Enforcement (Guatemala)Organized Crime (Guatemala)Violent Crime (Guatemala) |