Drug Trade Flourishing in Guatemala, Officials Say

An exploding drug trade aided by extensive government corruption has turned Guatemala into the primary safe haven for Colombia’s cocaine headed through Mexico to the United States, according to U.S. and Guatemalan authorities.

An estimated 220 tons of cocaine passed through Guatemala last year, more than two-thirds of U.S. consumption of the drug, according to State Department officials.

The increased flow -- nearly triple the amount estimated a decade ago -- has turned parts of Guatemala into lawless zones ruled by family-controlled transit cartels, a development all too clear in this dry and dusty frontier state.

Here, where men wear holstered 9-millimeter pistols in public and judges fear for their lives, violence and corruption have exploded in recent months, local judicial officials say.

“It’s a kind of Old West,” said Alberto Brunori, the regional director of the United Nations mission here. “There are a lot of people involved in the drug trade. You can see that.”

U.S. concern over Guatemala’s role in the drug trade has been growing for several years. In the 1990s, drugs moved from Colombia to the United States through several Central American countries and Mexico.

Now U.S. and Guatemalan anti-drug officials believe that Colombian drug traffickers have mostly consolidated their operations in Guatemala with the cooperation -- or at least tolerance -- of current and former Guatemalan government figures.

The drug trade has become so rampant that the Bush administration this year blacklisted Guatemala for failing to cooperate in the fight against drugs -- one of only three such countries in the world, alongside Myanmar and Haiti. The government waived the requirement that the U.S. cut aid to Guatemala, however, citing the country’s ongoing poverty and social unrest.

The U.S. government has also convened a federal grand jury to investigate charges of corruption involving highly placed government and ex-military officials for laundering money through U.S. banks, according to Guatemala’s former top anticorruption prosecutor, Karen Fischer.

Fischer, who resigned in March after allegedly being pressured to drop a money laundering case involving President Alfonso Portillo, said she has offered to serve as a witness for the U.S. case, which involves the diversion of $15 million in government funds.

U.S. officials said an investigation was underway into Guatemalan government officials and money laundering, but did not confirm that a grand jury was involved.

Guatemalan government officials deny that there are any direct, high-level links to drug traffickers, though they acknowledge that there have been shortcomings in the war on drugs in the last few years. They blame the U.S. for failing to provide enough assistance to combat drug traffickers, whose speedy boats and airplanes overwhelm the underfunded Guatemalan police force.

“When we detect a drug boat, we only see the bubbles in the water that they leave behind,” said Zury Rios, a congresswoman and daughter of retired Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, president of Congress. “We need support and backing.”

Portillo has repeatedly declared his innocence of all criminal charges, though the multiple investigations against him and his political allies have placed him under pressure.

He broke down in tears at a government ceremony this month after another scandal involving his political allies. He told the audience that he was “not going through my best moments, either as a person, or as the president.”

Indications of collaboration between drug traffickers and government officials are numerous. Last year, officers from Guatemala’s anti-drug police force were accused by local prosecutors of stealing more cocaine from police warehouses than they seized. More than a dozen anti-drug officers were sentenced in April for holding the small town of Chocon near the Caribbean coast hostage as they tortured and killed two residents in an attempt to steal 2 tons of cocaine.

Cocaine seizures dropped from an average of 9.7 tons a year in the two years before Portillo took office in 2000 to an average of 2.8 tons a year over the last three years. U.S. officials believe that the decline results from government officials being paid off, not a decrease in drug trafficking.

One anti-narcotics judge who oversees cases along the Caribbean coast, where several main smuggling routes converge, said high-level government and police officials are deeply involved in the drug trade.

He described a case in which three officers from the Presidential General Staff, a special military unit designed to protect Portillo, visited him and threatened to have him removed from his job if he continued pursuing drug cases.

The judge, who asked that he not be identified for fear of risking his life, said that on another occasion, he asked for a police raid on a suspected drug house, only to be told that no officers were available because they were protecting an important government functionary visiting the home of a suspected drug lord.

“The problem is that there are people who are untouchable,” said the judge, who is always accompanied by four armed bodyguards and has received repeated death threats. “It’s a plague, it’s a plague.”

The United Nations, the Organization of American States and Guatemalan human rights prosecutors are forming a commission to investigate the charges of a “parallel government.” Most observers believe that many former Guatemalan military officials -- deprived of purpose and prestige since the country’s civil war ended in 1996 -- have turned to crime to support themselves.

“If we don’t watch out, we could become another Colombia,” said Francisco Bianchi, a former Rios Montt ally and now a vice presidential candidate for the Principles and Values Party, which is pushing to clean up government corruption. “What has happened here is that narco-traffickers have infiltrated the people in authority -- both the army and the government.”

There have been some positive signs in recent months. The government seems on the verge of signing a pact allowing the U.S. Coast Guard to search suspected drug boats in Guatemalan waters.

Extraditions from Guatemala to the U.S. have begun again after a 10-year hiatus.

Perhaps most important, at U.S. urging, the discredited anti-drug police unit was disbanded last fall. So far this year, the new, U.S. trained-unit has already seized more cocaine than was seized in all of last year.