Drug War Capitalism

by Dawn Paley

  “I am a survivor, I lost my whole family. They killed my father, my mother, an older brother, two sisters, and a younger brother. When they killed my mother, she was pregnant,” Osorio Chen told us. “The army destroyed our community. They wanted to eliminate the whole community, but still, thank God, we survived. I don’t know how, how we could survive all of that, but thanks be to God that here we are, alive.” Survivors like Osorio were eventually required to settle in the model village of Pacux, which he likened to a cage, a place where community members no longer have access to firewood or land to plant and harvest their crops. Entire communities were fragmented and decimated through mass murder, survivors forced into military-controlled model villages like this one. After the massacre, Osorio Chen spent two years hidden in the mountains, sleeping under trees and eating plants to stay alive.

  In a pattern repeated throughout the country, members of the community were labeled guerrilla supporters and communists to justify the massacres in the Rio Negro area, of which there were five. Beside the memorial where I first met Osorio Chen sits Pacux’s one-room community hall, the walls of which are painted with even more names of people killed. “We’re talking about approximately 700 people, because what you see on the list are about 450, but there are people who were disappeared, children; we still don’t know if maybe there are some people who live nearby but who won’t come back to Rabinal out of fear,” said Tecú Osorio, who was a boy when he witnessed the killings of his relatives by the army and the Civilian Patrol in 1982. He says the genocide against his people, the Maya Achi, was carried out to make way for the construction of the Chixoy Dam, a project funded by the World Bank. “What was called communism, in Rio Negro, was the community’s opposition to the project and defense of their territories. The fight was because the peasants were defending their territories, and the government was responding to the demands of transnational corporations with interests in building the dams.” Tecú Osorio’s words would continue to echo for me as I navigated a present deeply marked by the wounds of the past.

  Massacres weren’t the only terror technique deployed in Guatemala. In 2012, I spoke with José Samuel Suasnávar, the executive sub-director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. When we met, forensic anthropologists had just turned up over 400 skeletons at a military base known since 2006 as the Regional Training Command for Peacekeeping Operations, or CREOMPAZ, in Cobán, Guatemala, in what fast became one of the largest discoveries of a clandestine mass grave in the country. During the country’s thirty-six-year internal armed conflict, which led to acts of genocide, the base at Cobán was a center of military coordination and intelligence. “We have a few more than 400 trenches, where we’ve found I think sixty graves, and we’ve found 426 skeletons, mostly men, like everywhere else, but there’s also women, and what’s particular to CREOMPAZ is that there are also many children,” Suasnávar told me. “What is radically different about this military base … is that here there are up to sixty-two people buried in one single grave, representing a single event.” Suasnávar explained how incidents of massacres and those of forced disappearances during the internal conflict responded to economic logic. Most of the massacres during the war took place in the Guatemalan highlands, in areas inhabited by a Mayan majority, but many of the disappearances took place in the fertile lowlands, where Guatemala’s land-owning elite ran cotton, coffee, and sugar plantations. Laborers would come from all over the country to work during harvest season. Suasnávar said the economic costs of carrying out open and massive counterinsurgency in the lowlands in the Pacific Coast region were far higher than the political costs. “If they carried out massacres there, as they did in other places, who would work in export agriculture?” he asked. “The disappearance of people, the disappearances of leaders, this was what took place there in a more selective way than how it transpired in other areas.”

  Many of the disappeared may have eventually been taken to places like CREOMPAZ, in the interior of the country, and murdered there. There are few bullet wounds among the dead; most of the skeletons still show evidence of being bound, and many reveal bones that had been broken, healed, and re-broken, indicating that the dead had been tortured and interrogated, some for lengthy periods of time, before they were killed and thrown in the pits. The dig in Cobán is revealing the gruesome reality of the country’s internal armed conflict, where people labeled subversives—political and student activists, Indigenous leaders and community members, and others—were kidnapped and tortured en masse. Children were also murdered before being dumped in graves at the base.

  The work of identifying the country’s disappeared is monumental. Of the 50,000 disappeared, the names of 42,000 are known. Eighteen thousand bodies have been found in clandestine graves, but so far only 500 have been identified.

  But what set the dig at CREOMPAZ apart is that it took place at an active military base: foreign military and police arrive regularly at the base to train troops from Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and the Dominican Republic. The killings took place within the protective confines of a military-controlled area where today blue-helmeted peacekeepers from the United Nations are trained.

  In 2013, General Efraín Rios Montt and Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez, his head of intelligence, were tried for the genocide of the Maya Ixil people during the former’s dictatorship in 1982–1983. The dig at CREOMPAZ and the recent genocide trial are two ongoing efforts by activists and nongovernmental organizations in Guatemala to force official acknowledgment, reparations, justice, and closure for the millions of survivors of the internal conflict. While some officials like Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz have pushed hard for justice, others in the Guatemalan legislative and executive branches actively deny genocide. This was blatantly displayed when the Constitutional Court overturned the Guatemala City court’s guilty ruling against Rios Montt on procedural grounds. Terror in Guatemala is far from being a thing of the past; instead it exists in the memories and daily lives of millions of survivors, and it continues to manifest in systemic racism, discrimination, and violence against the Indigenous majority.

  Guatemalan president Otto Pérez Molina is a perfect example of how power and impunity reign in Guatemala. Pérez Molina was a major and head of intelligence in the Guatemalan Army and served in the Ixil triangle during the genocide, for which Rios Montt stood trial. He eventually became a general and received training at the School of the Americas. Nearly thirty years later, in September 2011, Pérez Molina was elected president. “He held very important positions inside the military high command in these settings, therefore even if he did not participate directly in a massacre, he obviously made decisions and directed and coordinated military actions, operations which led to massacres,” asserts Luis Solano, a Guatemalan journalist and researcher. “Otto Pérez Molina arrives to the Presidency of the Republic with a curriculum stained by his past in counterinsurgency, his dark passage through military intelligence, and his tight links with the conservative business elite.”[3] Pérez Molina campaigned on hands, head, and heart: an iron fist against crime, a head for development, and a heart in support of the poorest Guatemalans. Pérez Molina described his own style of governance as one inspired by Colombia’s controversial ex-president Álvaro Uribe. He also promised to use Kaibiles, Guatemala’s elite special forces (whose members have been linked to Los Zetas) in the war on drugs. After his election, Pérez Molina tapped numerous retired military men from his party, called the Patriot Party (PP), to become ministers in his government. One of them, General Ulises Noé Anzueto Girón, the minister of defense, was accused of participating with eight others in the torture and murder of Efraín Bámaca, a member of the since-disappeared guerrilla group, Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA).

  Pérez Molina has made public calls for drug legalization. Some analysts believe that he and his Patriot Party, which has an important support base among soldiers and veterans, is between a rock and a hard place. To effectively interrupt the flow of
drugs, he’d have to fight against his own: the army has long been known to be enmeshed in the drug trade. “My perspective is that [Pérez Molina’s] proposal is a smokescreen, something designed to distract from the confluence of problems of Guatemalan society, and particularly those of the rural peasant farmers,” said Kajkok Maximo Ba Tiul, a Maya Poqomchi’ analyst and university professor based in Cobán, Alta Verapaz. “What is in dispute is territory, and especially the territory of Indigenous peoples, and so, while he’s consolidating his process of control, he comes up with this, knowing full well that he can’t fight his friends and colleagues, and that he has no capacity to pressure the United States.” Regardless of Pérez Molina’s rhetoric, Guatemala continues to arm more soldiers and police, supposedly to fight drug trafficking, following the US State Department’s strategy in the region. Instead of fighting communism, today’s military buildup is justified by the war on drugs. This is a crucial backdrop to understanding the introduction of the drug war in Guatemala, the imposition of a new war on a society still reeling from genocide, where perpetrators and supporters of terror continue to live in impunity, while their victims face a new round of militarization.

  Enter the Drug War

  Peace accords, signed in 1996, promised to cut the military budget and reduce the army’s power and control, but demilitarization remains a distant promise. Since 2000, the army has been back patrolling in the streets on the premise of fighting organized crime. “The state needs something to make the population believe that there needs to be militarization, in order to control everything. That something had to be invented, and it’s called drug trafficking,” said Ba Tiul, when I interviewed him at his home in 2012. We sat around the kitchen table as his partner prepared tamales for lunch, their conversation drifting from threats against community members resisting power lines to a comrade who had been knifed for organizing in his community. Just as, in many instances, the internal conflict in Guatemala unraveled in areas deemed important for energy projects or resource extraction, militarization today is taking place in areas where there are fierce social and land conflicts related to the imposition of mega-projects.

  “In less than ten months, this government has inaugurated three new military bases, and there’s talk about a fourth that could be up and running by the end of this year or the beginning of next, all with the argument—and this is what worries us—of the supposed fight against drug trafficking. This has been the pretext for the participation of the army in civilian law enforcement,” said Iduvina Hernández Batres, of the Guatemala City-based NGO Security and Democracy (SEDEM) in an interview in late 2012. Hernández points out that the construction of new military bases is taking place in areas already steeped in social conflict. The positioning of new military bases in areas of heightened social conflict has raised alarm bells for local activists. One of the new bases is in San Juan Sacatepequez, which is the site of a major struggle against a highway project and a cement company; another in Panzós, near a proposed nickel mine in El Estor and where surrounding areas are steeped in land conflicts related to the industrial production of African palm; and the third in Petén, the huge northern region of the country, which is currently undergoing a wave of oil investment and development.[4] “While it is true that there is narco activity on the Atlantic coast, the military base there isn’t in that area of the territory, but below, right near a community in the area of Panzós.… Where there are intense conflicts in the community because of the presence of a nickel mining company, this company has already had a serious record of human rights violations, including suspicions that there have been extrajudicial executions. And it’s in this area that the base is being installed. We think that it’s a pretext to return back to the level of militarization that existed during the harshest stage of the armed conflict, which resulted in acts of genocide,” Hernández told me in her Guatemala City office in 2012.

  Maria Magdalena Cuc Choc lives in a palm-roofed house near Lake Izabal in El Estor, not far from Panzós. For her, this new wave of militarization hits close to home. Her brother-in-law was killed by private security for his activism against the nickel mine mentioned by Hernández Batres. Her brother is in jail for the same reason. The mining project was first proposed by Canada’s Inco, and later taken up by Vancouver-based Skye Resource, which sold it to a third Canadian company called HudBay Minerals (it’s now owned by Russia’s Solway Investment Group). “Here in Guatemala the big struggle that we have as Indigenous peoples is against the state of Guatemala and large landholders. Here there are many multinational and transnational companies, foreign companies, that are buying lands that belong to our grandparents,” said Cuc Choc. “Here there are mining companies, oil companies, companies that plant monocultures like African palm, there are also rubber companies.… We enter into a conflict dynamic, because we want to recuperate the land.… They displace us from our properties.”

  She talked about how police and the army defend corporate interests against Indigenous resistance, and how paramilitary groups are formed by elites looking to protect their interests. “When we were removed from our lands, or when communities are displaced, the first thing they do is bring in the armed forces of the state, which are members of the army, Kaibiles, as they’re called, and the national civil police. But in addition to that, the companies, or their owners, or large landholders, contract our Q’eqchi’ brothers who have already served in the military, and they contract them as security guards, and then they also contract others, people that we could call private forces. They give them guns, they give them machetes, they give them ski masks so that they can go and displace people, kill people, abuse people—all of this equipment that they give them is like a way of saying, ‘Go do whatever you want, no one will recognize you.’” The strategies Cuc Choc identifies are generally ignored in the media and in analyses of the violence in Guatemala, which instead focus on drug cartels and the like.

  Amilcar de Jesús Pop Ac is a lawmaker and head of the congressional transparency commission. He was first elected when Pérez Molina was brought to power, as the lone representative of Winaq, a left Indigenous party. Pop also thinks national security policy in Guatemala is driven by the extractive industries, not opposition to drug trafficking. “This government especially, which is of military persuasion, bases Guatemala’s national security policy on the needs and desires of social control dictated by the extractive industries, all the industries linked to extractives: hydroelectric projects, mining, oil, now generate the directives of national security policy.” I had arranged a meeting with him after we were introduced in a bar in the city’s historic old downtown, where he was drinking whiskey with a group of progressive lawyers. “We’re seeing that the army has detachments in all of the physical spaces where these industries and companies are setting up,” he said.

  Communities that resist displacement and the extractive industries have been tarred with accusations that they’re involved in the organized crime, and in some cases entire peasant villages have even been labeled narco-communities. “The strongest impacts in terms of human rights, which also occurred during the national security doctrine, which here led to genocide, is the idea that an entire community can be criminal,” said Claudia Samayoa. She’s the coordinator of UDEFEGUA, a group dedicated to monitoring attacks and threats against activists. “You can’t denominate as narco an entire community, including everyone from the baby that was just born to an elder who is dying,” she told me in her bustling Guatemala City office. In the cases investigated by UDEFEGUA, Samayoa says there may be one or two members of a given community involved in drug trafficking, and the rest of the community stays silent because of fear and intimidation. “As community-based opposition to natural resource extraction projects and hydroelectric dam construction has grown, governmental and business sectors increasingly have made public statements to the press to suggest that current grassroots activism is inherently ‘terrorist’ in nature, alternatively suggesting that drug trafficker influence is invol
ved or that the sentiments are manipulated and/or funded by outsiders and specifically international entities,” reads a 2013 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.[5] This pattern was brought into evidence during unrest in Santa Cruz Barrillas in 2012. As locals engaged in blockades to prevent the installation of a new hydroelectric company in their lands, Pérez Molina claimed that protesters were backed by drug traffickers and funded by international interests.

  In early 2012, I visited Nueva Esperanza, in Petén, which was denominated a narco-community by the government of Álvaro Colom (who preceded Otto Pérez Molina). To get to Nueva Esperanza, we boarded an old school bus, which left from a busy backstreet in the city of Tenosique, in the southern Mexican state of Tabasco. The bus does a twice daily milk run through half a dozen small agricultural communities, ending at the Guatemalan border. The temperature was over 100 degrees, and the bus so full at the beginning that a couple of young men hung out the door as we drove. We continued on for about two hours until there were just three of us left. On a dusty strip of road surrounded by small houses and facing a soccer field, we stepped off the bus at the end of the line. The tiny Mexican ranching town of Nuevo Progreso ends a couple of hundred meters away, where a gathering of shelters built from scrap wood, old galvanized roofing, and USAID tarps marks the border into Guatemala.

  In 2000, forty landless farmers formed the agroecological Community of Nueva Esperanza. “We needed more people to live in the community, and so when we met someone who needed land, we would tell them [to come], and support them, and we all supported each other to build our community, and that’s how it grew to a total of 150 families,” said Marcelo Martínez Morales, who moved to Nueva Esperanza after being displaced by Hurricane Mitch. “We started to work the land, planting corn, beans, chiwa, sweet potato, yucca, macal, peanuts, sesame—that’s what we planted.” From the beginning, the community tried to get legal title to the land. “We tried for a long time, and instead of recognizing our community we were evicted for the first time” in 2007, he tells me. A second eviction took place in 2008. Both times, soldiers and police who said they had orders to protect the forest forced them from their homes. Some families fled in fear, but with nowhere else to go and no other options, most returned.