LATIN AMERICA : A Question of Fear in Guatemala

Critics scoffed when President Ramiro de Leon Carpio ordered more than 1,000 troops into the streets over the holidays in a bid to halt chronic violence, at least for a few days.

“The criminals will just go on vacation until the soldiers return to the barracks,” said human rights activist Mario Polanco.

He was wrong. Despite the troops, the crooks were still out in full force. In four days beginning Dec. 23, 100 people were murdered and 175 were severely injured by stabbings or gunfire.

It may be a fitting finale for De Leon’s term, which ends Jan. 14, analysts say.

As voters go to the polls Sunday to choose his successor, statistics show that the former human rights champion has done little more to halt Guatemala’s endemic violence than either the indifferent military dictators who ruled the country for two generations or the fumbling civilians who succeeded them after 1986.

Five hundred murders were committed in the last three months of 1995--a slight increase over the same period the year before.

Public safety is a major campaign promise of both candidates in this weekend’s presidential runoff. But observers are skeptical that either favored candidate Alvaro Arzu, a prominent businessman and former Guatemala City mayor, or Alfonso Portillo, a skillful politician backed by former military dictator Efrain Rios Montt, will be any more effective than De Leon has been.

“High levels of [official] impunity, an ill-equipped police force and an inadequate government response to deal with present-day crime rates” are problems that simply are passed down from one administration to another, said Ronalth Ochaeta, director of the Roman Catholic archbishop’s human rights legal office.

Guatemala has one police officer for every 2,200 citizens, compared with the international standard ratio of 1 to 1,500. And as daunting as those numbers may be, officials say, the attitudes of key figures here toward power and the law can be even more difficult to overcome.

“Certain powerful economic and military groups do not want to cede their privileges--they use the corrupt structures to protect themselves,” said Nineth Montenegro, a veteran human rights activist recently elected to Congress for the newly formed leftist party, New Guatemalan Democratic Front.

She and others note that the problem groups range from gangs to paramilitary organizations.

Their victims also run the gamut.

Lucina Cardenas, 40, a Mexican social worker, was abducted as she drove from Mexico to Guatemala City in late November. Farm workers discovered her bullet-ridden body, dotted with cigarette burns, tossed beside a road.

No one has been arrested in her killing despite pressure from the Mexican government, which suspects paramilitary gangs. Cardenas and her colleagues had received death threats from an otherwise unknown group, which calls itself the Urban Commandos.

In contrast, Oly Hopun was killed simply for money. A U.S. citizen born in Belize, Hopun, 60, had lived in Guatemala for years. She was abducted in late October by one of the many bands of kidnappers who operate here and was held for an undisclosed ransom--money her husband, Urich Seifert, could not raise. A month later, he was called to identify a body in a city grave plot marked “unknown.” She had been shot in the head. The killers got away.

That criminals can commit killings such as these with such impunity is indicative of Guatemala’s inability to guarantee even the most basic of human rights, noted a stinging United Nations report issued in October. The report recommended that Guatemala modernize its police, judicial system and attorney general’s office.

But making such recommendations is far easier than carrying them out in this troubled country, as De Leon observed in a news conference in late November. Asked about his record on controlling violence, he conceded: “Being president is a lot different from being attorney general for human rights.”