Guatemala: Heartbreak and Hope

The dead wait outside the house of God.

At the Metropolitan Cathedral in the heart of Guatemala City, 12 brown marble columns bear their mute testament. Perez Mendez, Jobito.

Perez Mendez, Juan.

Perez Ortega, Jacinto.

The names once belonged to people. Now they are carved into the sides of stone pillars that support a wroughtiron fence. A banner draped over the metal bars beckoned pilgrims to visit the cathedral’s sanctuary, to walk past the dead and their pillars of stone.

Quiix, Cristina.

Quiix, Gregorio.

Quiix, Hilario.

The plaza just west of the church is popular with the poor. On Sundays, laughing children chase pigeons and devour sweet orange chunks of papaya sold by shouting vendors. Lovers cuddle. The delicious smell of roasting corn and fire-grilled chicken fills the air.

The plaza is crowded with people. Some sell goats. Others hawk votive candles or snapshots taken atop a family of white plastic ponies.

The Roman Catholic Church asks visitors to remember the men, women and children who were massacred, tortured and disappeared in the civil war.

Cux, Tomas.

Cux Caal, Pablo.

Cuxum, Francisco.

Most of the victims were descendants of the Maya.

Investigations by the church and the United Nations turned up witnesses who saw people shot, burned alive and tossed into mass graves. Killers saved bullets by grabbing children by their heels and swinging their heads into stone walls.

The church called the killings Guatemala’s Holocaust when it erected the memorial more than six years ago.

“The names etched here represent thousands of people who suffered grave violations of their intrinsic dignity as human beings,” the memorial says.

Tiu Castro, Jose.

Tiu Castro, Juan.

Tiu Castro, Julio.

Investigators link 90 percent of the slaughter to the military governments that controlled Guatemala during the war years.

That is a delicate, dangerous matter.

In 1998, Guatemalan Bishop Juan Gerardi demanded justice. He released his own report blaming the military for the deaths. He was assassinated two days later.

His killers, as well as a handful of others responsible for the Guatemalan genocide, were brought to trial. Their convictions have almost all been overturned.

There is no memorial for the people dying from today’s drug crimes.

History complicates the ability of the U.S. and Guatemala to work together on today’s problems, including drugs.

The Central Intelligence Agency helped stage a coup in 1954 to fight a land reform movement U.S. politicians feared could open the door to communism.

The coup eased the way for military dictatorships and decades of repression. In the 1980s, the genocide was at its worst.

That’s when the U.S. supplied Guatemala’s government with weapons, and joined in dismissing the stories of terror and death as fiction from guerillas.

President Clinton in 1999 went to Guatemala and apologized for the coup and for the policies that contributed to Guatemala’s suffering.

Today, U.S. diplomats press Guatemalan leaders to support human rights and to investigate the killing and corruption connected to drug trafficking.

The killings at the cave were discovered the week Guatemalan President Oscar Berger marked his first year in office.

Newspaper polls showed a majority of Guatemalans back Berger but are concerned about the nation’s poverty and its struggle with crime.

People at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City are Berger believers.

Unlike his predecessors, Berger has moved forcefully to address government corruption and remove historical obstacles to democracy. One of his boldest moves so far has been reducing by half the size of the Guatemalan military.

Former FBI agent Raymond Campos has spent more than seven years working out of the embassy, trying to help Guatemalan police.

Many of the nation’s poorly trained police officers can barely read or write, let alone investigate narcotrafficking.

“What we are trying to do right now is really get down to basics,” Campos said.

It has been barely a decade since the country overhauled its penal code, dividing duties between police, prosecutors and the courts. Before then, judges went to the crime scenes, directed the removal of the victims’ bodies, then decided what evidence went to investigators.

Campos’ chief accomplishment has been to negotiate, encourage and cajole the national police to try using a standardized incident report form — just as a test — in one precinct.

Such forms at U.S. police departments provide the raw material for building cases. In Guatemala, paper trails are unknown, making it easy to drop cases or to make them disappear.

“That’s been the real Achilles heel of the operation,” Campos said.

Arrests are made in only 5 percent of criminal cases. Out of 250,000 criminal cases sent to prosecutors each year, only 2.7 percent see charges filed. Of those, only about 2 percent ever wind up being decided in court.

Against these numbers Guatemala’s justice system faces the most sophisticated and organized drug traffickers on earth.

“I got here in ’99. Nobody had even heard of crack,” said Mick Hogan, a regional adviser in the embassy’s narcotics affairs section.

A former special forces soldier, Hogan’s office walls are cluttered with awards and memorabilia from more than two decades following U.S. policy, including fighting narcotraffickers in Central and South America.

What he’s seeing in Guatemala now reminds him of the pattern that emerged in other countries — particularly Colombia — where drug trafficking created riches for the criminal few and suffering for the majority.

“Read the violence figures,” he said. “There is no doubt about it. It is all narcotics -related.”

The U.S. two years ago threatened to pull financial support for Guatemala’s anti-drug efforts, citing poor performance and rampant corruption.

Just before that, an elite police unit used torture and illegal wiretaps to build drug-trafficking cases. Members of the same unit also stole tons of the cocaine they’d seized, and put it back on the streets for the money.

The DEA also keeps tabs on the drug trafficking. Mike O’Brien has six agents for the entire country.

“I’ve been happy with the efforts Guatemala has put out to combat narcotrafficking,” O’Brien said. “It’s just with the resources they have, it is very hard.”

Guatemala’s new leaders face tremendous challenges, he said. They lack airworthy helicopters and other aircraft to chase smugglers. And investigators, by law, cannot conduct stings or try to trap traffickers into selling drugs. Also forbidden are plea bargains, the keystones to building conspiracy cases.

Well protected, and usually well connected, the biggest criminals walk free.

“It is very difficult for them to attack the heads of these organizations,” O’Brien said.

The U.S. also faces limitations.

It spends millions on Guatemalan social and economic programs, including a Latin American version of Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or DARE.

Directly fighting narcotraffickers on Guatemalan soil is another matter.

Neither nation wants U.S. troops patrolling the jungle. The most military help comes from U.S. helicopters from neighboring Honduras that sometimes carry Guatemalan police on drug raids. In March, the U.S. lifted a 15-year ban on direct aid to Guatemala’s military. The ban was put in place because of Guatemala’s human rights abuses.

Meanwhile, drug pipelines bring suffering to both countries.

“Everybody’s fighting the war on drugs, and lives are being lost all the way down,” O’Brien said.