Frank Smyth*

WASHINGTON, Nov 22 2005 (IPS) — The alert to the U.S. Border Patrol went out across the state of Texas this past July – about 30 suspects who were once part of an elite unit of the Guatemalan special forces were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just over the border from McAllen.

The unit, called the Kaibiles after the Mayan prince Kaibil Balam, is one of the most fearsome military forces in Latin America, blamed for many of the massacres that occurred in Guatemala during its 36-year civil war.

By September, Mexican authorities announced that they had arrested seven Guatemalan Kaibiles, including four “deserters” who were still listed by the Guatemalan Army as being on active duty.

Mexican authorities say the Kaibiles were meant to augment Las Zetas, a drug gang of soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn from Mexico’s own special forces. It’s logical that the Zetas would turn to their Guatemalan counterparts.

In addition to being a neighbour, “Guatemala is the preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipment of cocaine to the United States”, the State Department has consistently reported to Congress since 1999.

In early November, anti-drug authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala told the Associated Press that 75 percent of the cocaine that reaches U.S. soil passes through the Central American nation.

More importantly, perhaps, the dominant institution in the country – the military – is linked to this illicit trade. Over the past two decades, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has quietly accused Guatemalan military officers of all ranks in every branch of service of trafficking drugs to the United States, according to government documents obtained by The Texas Observer newspaper.

The George W. Bush administration recently alleged that two retired Guatemalan Army generals, at the top of the country’s military hierarchy, are involved in drug trafficking and has revoked their U.S. visas based on these allegations.

The retired generals, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Francisco Ortega Menaldo, are Guatemala’s former top two intelligence chiefs. They are also among the founders of an elite, shadowy club within Guatemala’s intelligence command that calls itself “la cofradía” or “the brotherhood”, according to U.S. intelligence reports.

The U.S. reports, recently declassified, credit la cofradía with “engineering” tactics that roundly defeated Guatemala’s Marxist guerrillas. A U.N. Truth Commission later found the same tactics included “acts of genocide” for driving out or massacring the populations of no less than 440 Mayan villages.

Since then, the same intelligence commands have turned their clandestine structures to organised crimes, according to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and other U.S. intelligence reports, from importing stolen U.S. cars to running drugs to the United States. Yet not one officer has ever been prosecuted for any international crime in either Guatemala or the United States.

Guatemala is hardly the first military tainted by drugs; senior intelligence and law enforcement officers in many Latin American nations have been found colluding with organised crime. But what distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them.

The impunity that shields Guatemalan military officers from justice for criminal offences started during the Cold War. “There is a long history of impunity in Guatemala,” noted Congressman William Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, who is also a member of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.

“The United States has contributed to it in a very unsavory way dating back to 1954, and also in the 1980s,” he added, referring to a Central Intelligence Agency-backed coup d’état in 1954, which overturned a democratically elected president and brought the Guatemalan military to power, and to the Reagan administration’s covert backing of the Guatemalan military at a time when bloodshed against Guatemalan civilians was peaking.

Some Guatemalan officers called their approach at the time the practice of “draining the sea to kill the fish”, or of attacking civilians suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas instead of the armed combatants themselves.

Forensic teams have since exhumed many mass graves. Some unearthed women and infants. More than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala in what stands as Central America’s bloodiest conflict during the Cold War.

The violence left the military firmly in control of Guatemala, and it did not take long for this stability to catch the attention of Colombian drug syndicates.

“They chose Guatemala because it is near Mexico, which is an obvious entrance point to the U.S., and because the Mexicans have a long-established mafia,” explained one Andean law enforcement expert. “It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control.”

DEA special agents began detecting Guatemalan military officers running drugs as early as 1986, according to DEA documents obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. That’s when Ortega Menaldo took over from Callejas y Callejas as Guatemala’s military intelligence chief. Over the next nine years, according to the same U.S. documents, DEA special agents detected no less than 31 active duty officers running drugs.

“All roads lead to Ortega,” a U.S. drug enforcement expert said recently. “Even current active-duty officers may have other ties with retired officers. They have a mentor relationship.”

In 2002, the Bush administration was pressured into taking limited action to penalise top Guatemalan military officials thought to be involved in drug trafficking, including revoking Ortega Menaldo’s visa.

By then, he had already denied the U.S. drug charges, while reminding reporters in Guatemala City that he had previously collaborated with both the CIA and the DEA dating back to the 1980s.

The CIA, through spokesman Mark Mansfield, declined all comment for this article.

Eight months after revoking Ortega Menaldo’s visa, the Bush administration again cited suspected drug trafficking to revoke the U.S. entry visa of another Guatemalan intelligence chief, Ret. Gen. Callejas y Callejas.

However, rather than confront the impunity that allows Guatemalan military officers to traffic drugs, many of the country’s elected officials seem to be going in the opposite direction.

Not long after the Bush administration named the two retired cofradía intelligence chiefs as suspected drug traffickers, members of the Guatemalan Republican Front, or FRG party, which was founded by another retired army general, introduced legislation in the Guatemalan Congress that would remove civilian oversight over the military in criminal justice matters.

“This would be a new mechanism of impunity,” noted José Zeitune of the Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and author of a 2005 report on the Guatemalan judiciary.

The FRG was founded by Ret. Gen. Efrain Ríos Montt. A controversial figure, he launched a coup d’etat in 1982 to become president of Guatemala just as the intelligence officers of la cofradía were rising.

The current vice-chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee is Jerry Weller III, a Republican from Illinois. He recently married Zury Ríos Sosa, who is Ret. Gen. Montt’s daughter. Unlike other members of the Subcommittee, Weller, through his spokesman, Telly Lovelace, declined all comment for this article.

Congressman Weller’s father-in-law groomed Guatemala’s last president, an FRG member named Alfonso Portillo, who fled the country in 2004 to escape his own arrest for alleged money laundering, according to a State Department report.

Today, the shadowy structures of Guatemala’s intelligence commands are so embedded with organised crime that the Bush administration, for one, is already calling in the United Nations. Putting aside its usual criticisms of the international body, the administration supports a proposal to form a U.N.-led task force explicitly called the “Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Armed Groups and Clandestine Security Apparatus” in Guatemala.

So far the only nation to yield its sovereignty to allow the United Nations a similar role is Lebanon, where U.N. investigators are digging into the murder of a former prime minister.

The proposed U.N. plan for Guatemala also enjoys the support of its new president, Oscar Berger, a wealthy landowner and lawyer who is well respected by the U.S. administration. But the idea is encountering resistance from FRG politicians like Weller’s wife, Ríos Sosa, who is also an FRG congresswoman.

*Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been writing about Guatemalan drug trafficking since 1991. He is a contributor to “Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know”. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com. A longer version of this article appeared in the Texas Observer newspaper on Nov. 17.