HILLARY CLINTON URGES LATIN AMERICA TO FIGHT DRUG CORRUPTION

MEXICO CITY -- Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called for
Latin America to fight drug corruption in a regional swing that ended
Friday in Guatemala, days after that country's drug czar and national
police chief were jailed on suspicion of leading a police ring that
stole cocaine from drug traffickers.

The arrests underscored Guatemala's vulnerability to traffickers,
whose billions of dollars in profits and bribes are undermining a
fragile country still recovering from years of military rule and civil
war.

"Organized crime has infiltrated all aspects of the Guatemalan state,
and now rivals it in terms of power and influence," said Andrew
Hudson, senior associate at Human Rights First in New York.

Drug czar Nelly Bonilla was arrested Tuesday, along with Police Chief
Baltazar Gomez. They were accused of leading a criminal police gang
that stole 1,500 pounds of cocaine.

They were the latest in a string of police officers alleged to have
crumbled before the lure of drug profits.

The previous national police chief was jailed in 2009on suspicion of
stealing $300,000 from drug traffickers. A previous drug czar, Adan
Castillo, was caught on tape accepting $25,000 from a Drug Enforcement
Administration informant as payment for overseeing narcotics shipments
through Guatemala. He was invited to a DEA meeting in 2005 and
arrested when he arrived in Virginia.

Clinton has said that despite increased cooperation in the region
against drug traffickers, the Obama administration wants governments
there to work harder to confront corruption.

Upon arriving in Guatemala, she praised the arrests and called on
officials to "weed out corruption." Congress has authorized $1.6
billion for fighting drug trafficking in Mexico, Central America, the
Dominican Republic and Haiti under the three-year Merida Initiative.

"We're going to be asking more of a lot of our friends," Clinton said
earlier during a stop in Costa Rica. "A number of them are not
respecting democratic institutions. A number of them are not taking
strong enough stands against the erosion of the rule of law because of
the pressure from drug traffickers."

Guatemala has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the world.
Drug traffickers and gangs have revived insecurities in the
impoverished people, who are recovering from a 36-year civil war that
killed 200,000 people, most of them civilians.

A United Nations crime-fighting team, the International Commission
Against Impunity, spearheaded the investigation that led to the arrest
of the police officers. The team was created in 2007 to compensate for
the inability of the Guatemalan judicial system to solve crimes often
found to be committed by moonlighting members of the security forces.

The task force helped unravel the mystery behind the grisly killings
of three Salvadoran congressmen who were stopped on the highway in
2007 and burned to death. Guatemalan police detectives who were
working for a drug gang were found to be the perpetrators.

"Should we reform the National Police, or would it make more sense to
simply disband it, and found another?" asked a widely read opinion
piece in Guatemala's El Periodico newspaper. When corrupt police are
purged, "the most likely thing is that they, too, will participate in
other crimes almost as lucrative as drug transshipments: kidnappings,
extortion and assault."

Carlos Castresana, head of the U.N. task force, said at a news
conference that investigators learned of Bonilla's and Gomez's alleged
roles after an ambush last year of police officers who were trying to
steal 770 pounds of cocaine from a warehouse in scenic Amatitlan. He
said prosecutors were not allowed to investigate the crime scene,
raising suspicion.

Both officers denied involvement.

"We did not lend ourselves to organized crime," Gomez told reporters.
"Talk is cheap, and it's easy to jail someone. We did nothing."

Bonilla said she was "working for God and the law by going after drug
traffickers, and this is a nice way to get rid of us."