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Guatemala’s No. 1 crisis: ‘drugs and thugs’
By Georges de La Roche
Guatemalan ambassador to Canada
14
In July 2010, Ecuador's police and members of the military worked with the U.S. drug enforcement
administration to seize this submarine built to transport cocaine.
Drug trafficking is eating away at
our young democracies, corrupting
our institutions and infecting
our societies in general. Worse still,
we have evolved from transit countries
to consumers, making us a destination
market while poisoning our youth and
our future. This is because the narcos find
it more convenient to pay in drugs than
in cash.
While trying to preserve modest advances
in regional peace and democratic
security, we are confronting a well-organized
and better-financed adversary in
the form of transnational organized crime,
known to us as “drugs and thugs.” Guatemala
and Central America are now in a
turf war between organized crime cartels,
resulting in more gruesome occurrences in
the region. The region’s enemies are cartels
that peddle anything outside the formal
and legal sectors: drugs, contraband,
people and weapons.
Small governments, representing the
declared and formal market-state, struggle
against the undeclared and informal, the
illegal and the illicit. If the classic definition
of a state is “having a monopoly on the legitimate
means or use of violence,” we are
losing ground on a daily basis to the crime
syndicates. These well-financed criminals
often win the people over, displacing the
state and becoming local heroes, even
building schools and medical clinics.
Guatemala now has levels of violence
not seen since the worst days of its internal
conflict, with close to 13 people dying
every day as a result of crime. The cartels
are street-savvy, and their goal is to smuggle
and sell drugs to a consuming market.
Guatemala has almost 5,000 homicides
per year, and it is not the most violent
country in Central America, in relative
terms. The UN ranks us third. Some analysts
believe that half of all weapons flowing
illegally into Central America account
for most known homicides. Recently,
4,500 illegal weapons were confiscated in
Guatemala, and we judge narco activity to
account for much of the violence.
Another criminal actor in the informal
illicit sector are the youth gangs or maras,
with few people knowing exactly how
many there are in Guatemala. Studies
show different numbers. A USAID study
points to more than 120,000, including
38,000 in the U.S. and 20,000 in Mexico.
However, APREDE, Guatemala’s Association
for Crime Prevention, estimates there
are 165,000 juvenile gang members in the
country. One thing is certain: they outnumber
our police and soldiers combined
and have become much more involved
with narco-trafficking.
Having identified security as one of the
main challenges, the Central American
Integration System organized a conference
this year in support of the Central
American Security Strategy in Guatemala
City (held June 22). The strategy has four
main axes: combating crime, preventing
violence, rehabilitation and penitentiary
security and institutional strengthening.
Under these goals are more than 20 specific
programs regarding organized crime,
illegal drug trafficking, gangs, criminal
deportees, homicides, weapons smuggling,
terrorism, corruption, police reform,
legal aspects, juvenile and gender violence,
people trafficking, consumption, rehabilitation,
institutional strengthening, etcetera.
This security strategy specifies the
“need to integrate the different initiatives
that the region implements regarding security
matters, so as to harmonize them,
obtaining enhanced results.” Also, it seeks
to “facilitate the coordination, exchange of
information and experiences (by) identifying
necessary financial costs, resources
and capacities demanded by the institutions
in charge of public safety.”
One principle presented at the conference
was the idea of co-responsibility, with
the notion that Central America is one
piece of the puzzle, with South and North
America being the others. Within this
principle, a notion of “differentiality” exists
between the nations that consume narcotics
(destination markets), the nations
that produce them, and our “corridor nations”
used because of logistical considerations
for the smuggling of narcotics.
In short, it is cash and weapons moving
south and illicit products moving north
through our nations. We are victims of our
geographic location between the producing
south and consuming north.
Central America is, in fact, the No. 1
transit route for cocaine being transported
from South to North America. In 2006,
only 23 percent of known cocaine shipments
heading north passed through Central
America, but by 2010 that number had
risen to 90 percent and Guatemala alone
contributes to more than 60 percent of the
cocaine trafficked into the U.S.
According to our authorities, Guatemala
could become the world’s largest
producer of opium, second only to Afghanistan.
The cartels are branching out,
taking advantage of record droughts and
extreme rainy seasons, which have se-
FALL 2011 | OCT-NOV-DEC
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