Genocide, and drug-trafficking too

The Guatemalan military's war against the Mayans has finally been documented, but the story of its role in the cocaine trade has yet to be fully told.

By Frank Smyth

Mar 5, 1999 | WASHINGTON -- Last week a United Nations report confirmed that the Guatemalan military committed genocide against its own Mayan people during the country's four-decade civil war. But the impunity the military has long enjoyed for war crimes extends as well to drug trafficking. Many officers responsible for the human rights abuses documented by the U.N. have also been implicated in Guatemala's thriving drug-transshipping trade, but to date there has been no such public accounting of those activities.

Guatemala in this decade has been the staging ground for more air, sea and land transshipments of Colombian cocaine to the United States than any other country besides Mexico. The trend is only rising. This year the State Department reports that Guatemala now transships between 200 and 300 metric tons of cocaine annually -- or well over half of all the cocaine reaching the United States. The Guatemalan military has been responsible for much of the cocaine transshipping, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But the Clinton administration has looked away from the scandal, even trying to cover up the murder of Guatemala's top judge in 1994, which only established the Guatemalan military's impunity from American prosecution.

U.S. complicity with the Guatemalan military has a long history, of course. The CIA has enjoyed especially close ties. Back in 1954, the agency did everything but hold Col. Carlos Castillo Armas' hand as he deposed Jacobo Arbenz, the country's democratically elected president. The CIA-backed 1954 coup not only killed Guatemalan democracy, it established the country's military as its most powerful institution, accountable to no law. When leftist guerrillas began to emerge in the early 1960s, the CIA helped drive back the insurgency. When it resurfaced with surprising force in the early 1980s, the CIA too played an integral role in shaping the country's brutal response. Under both the Reagan and Bush administrations, the CIA provided substantial covert aid to Guatemala when Congress, largely over human rights objections, refused to overtly fund its counterinsurgency.

The United Nations Historical Clarification Commission found the Guatemalan military responsible for more than 90 percent of the country's war crimes including kidnapping, torture and murder, resulting in the death or disappearance of more than 200,000 civilians from 1960 to 1996. Most of the repression focused on Mayans in the Guatemalan highlands.

The killings peaked in the early 1980s, though massacres continued to occur. By 1990, however, the military was no longer just killing for politics. It began killing for greed too. A scramble for drug profits within the Guatemalan military was under way. Guatemala, like Mexico, with which it shares its northern border, was never a major drug transshipment route before the early 1990s, when Colombians established transit operations across the entire northern isthmus. First the Medellin and then the Cali cartel came to 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," said one Colombian drug enforcement official. "It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador because it offers more stability and was easier to control."

Guatemala's stability and control was achieved through cruelty that was unmatched anywhere in the region. Guatemala's counterinsurgency campaign was far more severe than El Salvador's, for instance. "The idea was to make the innocent pay for the guilty," a former Guatemalan army sergeant from Quiche once told me. The difference was that in El Salvador, military intelligence units might target a handful of young men to kill to ensure that they killed at least one guerrilla, while in Guatemala, military intelligence units frequently killed innocent people like children or seniors to punish an entire village for supporting the guerrillas.

Finally, in 1995, the Clinton administration announced that it was cutting off CIA aid to Guatemala over human rights violations. It did so after then-Rep. Robert Torricelli revealed that a paid agency informant, Guatemalan army Col. Julio Roberto Alpirez, was involved in the torture and murder of a captured guerrilla commandante, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was married to an American lawyer, Jennifer Harbury. But Clinton didn't cut off all CIA aid, only CIA counterinsurgency aid, which was no longer really needed as the country's protracted civil war would finally end the next year. The president allowed CIA counterdrug aid to Guatemala to continue.

President Clinton's own Intelligence Oversight Board claims the CIA is helping the DEA catch drug traffickers in Guatemala. But DEA special agents have collected enough evidence to formally accuse no fewer than 31 Guatemalan military officers of multi-ton drug trafficking over the past decade. It is unclear what, if anything, the CIA has done to help prosecute the officers. So far, only four former military officers have been tried. DEA suspects include many high-ranking officials, including generals and a former air force commander.

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