THE UNTOUCHABLE NARCO-STATE

Guatemala's Military Defies The DEA

The alert went out across the state this past July. A McAllen-based
FBI analyst wrote a classified report that the Department of Homeland
Security sent to U.S. Border Patrol agents throughout Texas. About 30
suspects who were once part of an elite unit of the Guatemalan special
forces were training drug traffickers in paramilitary tactics just
over the border from McAllen. The unit, called the Kaibiles after the
Mayan prince Kaibil Balam, is one of the most fearsome military forces
in Latin America, blamed for many of the massacres that occurred in
Guatemala during its 36-year civil war. By September, Mexican
authorities announced that they had arrested seven Guatemalan
Kaibiles, including four "deserters" who were still listed by the
Guatemalan Army as being on active duty.

Mexican authorities say the Kaibiles were meant to augment Las Zetas,
a drug gang of soldiers-turned-hitmen drawn from Mexico's own special
forces. It's logical that the Zetas would turn to their Guatemalan
counterparts. In addition to being a neighbor, "Guatemala is the
preferred transit point in Central America for onward shipment of
cocaine to the United States," the State Department has consistently
reported to Congress since 1999. In early November, anti-drug
authorities at the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala told the Associated Press
that 75 percent of the cocaine that reaches American soil passes
through the Central American nation.

More importantly, perhaps, the dominant institution in the country-the
military-is linked to this illicit trade. Over the past two decades,
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has quietly accused
Guatemalan military officers of all ranks in every branch of service
of trafficking drugs to the United States, according to government
documents obtained by The Texas Observer. More recently, the Bush
administration has alleged that two retired Guatemalan Army generals,
at the top of the country's military hierarchy, are involved in drug
trafficking and has revoked their U.S. visas based on these
allegations.

The retired generals, Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas and Francisco
Ortega Menaldo, are Guatemala's former top two intelligence chiefs.
They are also among the founders of an elite, shadowy club within
Guatemala's intelligence command that calls itself "la cofradia" or
"the brotherhood," according to U.S. intelligence reports. The U.S.
reports, recently de-classified, credit la cofradia with "engineering"
tactics that roundly defeated Guatemala's Marxist guerrillas. A U.N.
Truth Commission later found the same tactics included "acts of
genocide" for driving out or massacring the populations of no less
than 440 Mayan villages.

Guatemala's military intelligence commands developed a code of silence
during these bloody operations, which is one reason why no officer was
ever prosecuted for any Cold War-era human rights abuses. Since then,
the same intelligence commands have turned their clandestine
structures to organized crimes, according to DEA and other U.S.
intelligence reports, from importing stolen U.S. cars to running drugs
to the United States. Yet not one officer has ever been prosecuted for
any international crime in either Guatemala or the United States.

There is enough evidence implicating the Guatemalan military in
illegal activities that the Bush administration no longer gives U.S.
military aid, including officer training. The cited offenses include
"a recent resurgence of abuses believed to be orchestrated by
ex-military and current military officials; and allegations of
corruption and narcotics trafficking by ex-military officers,"
according to the State Department's 2004 report on Foreign Military
Training.

While some in the Bush administration and Congress want to restart
foreign military training, others are concerned about the inability of
the Guatemalan government to rein in its military. "The reason that
elements of the army are involved so deeply in this illicit operation
is that the government simply does not have the power to stop them,"
said Texas Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who sits on the
Western Hemisphere Subcommittee of the Committee on International
Relations and is the Chairman of the Department of Homeland Security
Subcommittee on Investigations.

Guatemala is hardly the first military tainted by drugs; senior
intelligence and law enforcement officers in many Latin American
nations have been found colluding with organized crime. But what
distinguishes Guatemala from most other nations is that some of its
military suspects are accused not only of protecting large criminal
syndicates but of being the ringleaders behind them. The Bush
administration has recently credited both Colombia and Mexico with
making unprecedented strides in both prosecuting their own drug
suspects and extraditing others to the United States. But Guatemala,
alone in this hemisphere, has failed to either prosecute or extradite
any of its own alleged drug kingpins for at least 10 years.

For decades, successive U.S. administrations have tried and failed to
train effective Guatemalan police, while saying little or nothing
about the known criminal activities of the Guatemalan military. That
finally came to an end in the past three years under Republican Rep.
Cass Ballenger, a staunch conservative from North Carolina, who served
as chairman of the Western Hemisphere Subcommittee.

"Clearly, the Guatemalan government has not taken every step needed to
investigate, arrest, and bring drug kingpins to justice," said
then-Chairman Ballenger in 2003 before he retired. Echoing his
predecessor, the new Chairman, Indiana Republican Rep. Dan Burton,
commented through a spokesman that he wants to see the same alleged
ringleaders finally brought "to full accountability."

Until that happens, drugs from Guatemala and the attendant violence
will continue to spill over the Texas border.

Guatemala has long been sluggish in efforts to take legal action
against its military officers for human rights violations. That
impunity has since spread to organized criminal acts as well. The
turning point came in 1994, when Guatemala's extraditions of its drug
suspects came to a dead stop over a case involving an active duty army
officer. The case highlights both the terrible price for those who
seek justice in Guatemala and the timidity of the United States in
demanding accountability.

A military intelligence officer back in the early 1980s, Lt. Col.
Carlos Ochoa briefly trained at the U.S. Army Command and General
Staff College in 1988. Two years later, the DEA accused him of
smuggling drugs to locations including Florida, where DEA special
agents seized a small plane with half a metric ton of cocaine,
allegedly sent by the colonel.

State Department attorneys worked for more than three years to keep
Guatemala's military tribunals from dismissing the charges, and
finally brought Ochoa's extradition case all the way to Guatemala's
highest civilian court. The nation's chief justice, Epaminondas
Gonzalez Dubon, was already well respected for his integrity. On March
23, 1994, Guatemala's Constitutional Court, led by Gonzalez Dubon,
quietly ruled in a closed session (which is common in Guatemala)
four-to-three in favor of extraditing Ochoa.

Nine days later, on April 1, gunmen shot and killed Gonzalez Dubon
behind the wheel of his own car in the capital, near his middle-class
home, in front of his wife and youngest son. On April 12, the same
Constitutional Court, with a new chief justice, quietly ruled
seven-to-one not to extradite Ochoa. The surviving judges used the
same line in the official Constitutional Court register-changing the
verdict and date, but not the original case number-to literally copy
over the original ruling, as was only reported years later by the
Costa Rican daily, La Nacion.

The Clinton administration never said one word in protest. The U.S.
ambassador in Guatemala City at the time, Marilyn McAfee, by her own
admission had other concerns, including ongoing peace talks with the
Guatemalan military. "I am concerned over the potential decline in our
relationship with the military," she wrote to her superiors only
months before the assassination. "The bottom line is we must carefully
consider each of our actions toward the Guatemalan military, not only
for how it plays in Washington, but for how it impacts here."

Four years after the murder, the Clinton administration finally admitted
in a few lines buried in a thick report to Congress: "The Chief Justice
of the Constitutional Court had approved [the] extradition for the 1991
charges just before he was assassinated. The reconstituted court soon
thereafter voted to deny the extradition."

Ochoa may not have been working alone. "In addition to his narcotics
trafficking activities, Ochoa was involved in bringing stolen cars
from the U.S. to Guatemala," reads a "SECRET" U.S. intelligence report
obtained by U.S. lawyer Jennifer Harbury. "Another military officer
involved with Ochoa in narcotics trafficking is Colonel Julio Roberto
Alpirez de Leon."

Alpirez, who briefly trained at the U.S. School of the Americas in
1970, served "in special intelligence operations," according to a U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report. A White House Oversight
Board investigation later implicated him in the torture and murder of
a Marxist guerrilla leader who was married to the Harvard-trained
lawyer Harbury, and in the torture and mysterious decapitation of an
American hotelier named Michael Devine. Col. Alpirez, since retired,
has denied any wrongdoing and he was never charged with any crime.

But Ochoa, his former subordinate, is in jail today. Ochoa was
arrested-again-for local cocaine dealing in Guatemala City, where
crack smoking and violent crimes, especially rape, have become
alarmingly common. Ochoa was later sentenced to 14 years in prison,
and he remains the most important drug criminal ever convicted in
Guatemala to date.

Until now, the DEA had never publicly recognized the bravery of Judge
Gonzalez Dubon, who died defending DEA evidence. "The judge deserves
to be remembered and honored for trying to help establish democracy in
Guatemala," said DEA senior special agent William Glaspy in an
exclusive interview. Since the murder, the DEA has been all but
impotent in Guatemala.

The impunity that shields Guatemalan military officers from justice
for criminal offenses started during the Cold War. "There is a long
history of impunity in Guatemala," noted Congressman William Delahunt,
a Democrat from Massachusetts, who is also a member of the Western
Hemisphere Subcommittee. "The United States has contributed to it in a
very unsavory way dating back to 1954, and also in the 1980s," he
added, referring to a CIA-backed coup d'etat in 1954, which overturned
a democratically elected president and brought the Guatemalan military
to power, and to the Reagan administration's covert backing of the
Guatemalan military at a time when bloodshed against Guatemalan
civilians was peaking.

It was also during this Cold War-era carnage that the army's la
cofradia came into its own.

"The mere mention of the word 'cofradia' inside the institution
conjures up the idea of the 'intelligence club,' the term 'cofradia'
being the name given to the powerful organizations of village-church
elders that exist today in the Indian highlands of Guatemala," reads a
once-classified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable. "Many of
the 'best and the brightest' of the officers of the Guatemalan Army
were brought into intelligence work and into tactical operations
planning," it continues. Like all documents not otherwise attributed
in this report, the cable was obtained by the non-profit National
Security Archives in Washington, D.C.

According to the 1991 cable, "well-known members of this unofficial
cofradia include" then army colonels "Manuel Antonio Callejas y
Callejas" and "Ortega Menaldo." (Each officer had briefly trained at
the U.S. School of the Americas, in 1970 and 1976,
respectively.)

The intelligence report goes on: "Under directors of intelligence such
as then-Col. Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas back in the early
1980s, the intelligence directorate made dramatic gains in its
capabilities, so much so that today it must be given the credit for
engineering the military decline of the guerrillas from 1982 to the
present. But while doing so, the intelligence directorate became an
elite 'club' within the officer corps."

Other Guatemalan officers called their approach at the time the
practice of "draining the sea to kill the fish," or of attacking
civilians suspected of supporting leftist guerrillas instead of the
armed combatants themselves. One former Guatemalan Army sergeant, who
served in the bloodied province of Quiche, later told this author he
learned another expression: "Making the innocent pay for the sins of
the guilty."

CIA reports are even more candid. "The commanding officers of the
units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages
which are cooperating with the guerrilla[s] and eliminate all sources
of resistance," reads one 1992 Guatemala City CIA Station report
formerly classified "SECRET." The CIA report goes on, "When an Army
patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village it is
assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently
destroyed." Forensic teams have since exhumed many mass graves. Some
unearthed women and infants. More than 200,000 people were killed in
Guatemala in what stands as Central America's bloodiest conflict
during the Cold War.

The violence left the military firmly in control of Guatemala, and it
did not take long for this stability to catch the attention of
Colombian drug syndicates. First the Medellin and then the Cali
cartels, according to Andean drug experts, began searching for new
smuggling routes to the United States after their more traditional
routes closed down by the mid-1980s due to greater U.S. radar
surveillance over the Caribbean, especially the Bahamas.

"They chose 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," explained one Andean law enforcement expert.
"It is also a better transit and storage country than El Salvador
because it offers more stability and was easier to control."

DEA special agents began detecting Guatemalan military officers
running drugs as early as 1986, according to DEA documents obtained
through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. That's when Ortega
Menaldo took over from Callejas y Callejas as Guatemala's military
intelligence chief. Over the next nine years, according to the same
U.S. documents, DEA special agents detected no less than 31 active
duty officers running drugs.

"All roads lead to Ortega," a U.S. drug enforcement expert said
recently. "Even current active-duty officers may have other ties with
retired officers. They have a mentor relationship."

U.S. intelligence reports reveal the strong ties that cofradia
high-level officers cultivated with many subordinates, who are dubbed
"the operators." "This vertical column of intelligence officers, from
captains to generals, represents the strongest internal network of
loyalties within the institution," reads the 1991 U.S. DIA cable.
"Other capable officers were being handpicked at all levels to serve
in key operations and troop command," this U.S. report goes on.
"Although not as tight knit as the cofradia, the 'operators' all the
same developed their own vertical leader-subordinate network of
recognition, relationships and loyalties, and are today considered a
separate and distinct vertical column of officer loyalties."

Cofradia officers extended their reach even further, according to
another U.S. intelligence cable, as the mid-level officer "operators"
whom they chose in turn handpicked local civilians to serve as
"military commissioners [to be] the 'eyes and ears' of the military"
at the grassroots.

Few criminal cases better demonstrate the integration between the
Guatemalan intelligence commands and drug trafficking than one pursued
in 1990 by DEA special agents in the hot, sticky plains of eastern
Guatemala, near the nation's Caribbean coast. This 15-year-old case is
also the last time that any Guatemalans wanted on drug charges were
extradited to the United States. Arnoldo Vargas Estrada, a.k.a.
"Archie," was a long-time local "military commissioner," and the
elected mayor of the large town of Zacapa. U.S. embassy officials
informed (as is still required according to diplomatic protocol
between the two nations) Guatemalan military intelligence, then led by
Ortega Menaldo, that DEA special agents had the town mayor under
surveillance.

Vargas and two other civilian suspects were then arrested in Guatemala
with the help of the DEA. Not long after, all three men were
extradited to New York, where they were tried and convicted on DEA
evidence. But the DEA did nothing back in Guatemala when, shortly
after the arrests, the military merely moved the same smuggling
operation to a rural area outside town, according to family farmers in
a petition delivered to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City in 1992 and
addressed simply "Senores D.E.A."

"[B]efore sunrise, one of the planes that transports cocaine crashed
when it couldn't reach the runway on the Rancho Maya," reads the
document which the peasants either signed or inked with their
thumbprints. The document names the military commissioners along with
seven local officers, including four local army colonels whom the
farmers said supervised them.

One of the civilian military commissioners the peasants named was
Rancho Maya owner Byron Berganza. More than a decade later, in 2004,
DEA special agents finally arrested Berganza, along with another
Guatemalan civilian, on federal "narcotics importation conspiracy"
charges in New York City. Last year, the DEA in Mexico City also
helped arrest another Guatemalan, Otto Herrera, who ran a vast
trucking fleet from the Zacapa area. Then-Attorney General John
Ashcroft described Herrera as one of "the most significant
international drug traffickers and money launderers in the world."

Yet, not long after his arrest, Herrera somehow managed to escape from
jail in Mexico City. Not one of the Guatemalan military officers the
farmers mentioned in their 1992 petition has ever been charged. As the
DEA's Senior Special Agent Glaspy explained, "There is a difference
between receiving information and being able to prosecute somebody."

In 2002, then-Chairman Ballenger forced the Bush administration to
take limited action to penalize top Guatemalan military officials
thought to be involved in drug trafficking. "The visa of former
Guatemalan intelligence chief Francisco Ortega Menaldo was revoked,"
confirmed State Department spokesman Richard A. Boucher in March 2002,
"under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act related to
narco-trafficking, and that's about as far as I can go into the
details of the decision."

By then, Ret. Gen. Ortega Menaldo had already denied the U.S. drug
charges, while reminding reporters in Guatemala City that he had
previously collaborated with both the CIA and the DEA dating back to
the 1980s. Indeed, a White House Intelligence Oversight Board has
already confirmed that both the CIA and the DEA maintained at least a
liaison relationship with Guatemalan military intelligence in the late
1980s and early 1990s when it was run by Col. Ortega Menaldo.

The CIA, through spokesman Mark Mansfield, declined all comment for
this article.

Eight months after revoking Ortega Menaldo's visa, the Bush
administration again cited suspected drug trafficking to revoke the
U.S. entry visa of another Guatemalan intelligence chief, Ret. Gen.
Callejas y Callejas. But after the news broke in the Guatemalan press,
this cofradia officer never responded publicly, as Ortega Menaldo did,
to the U.S. drug allegation.

Rather than confront the impunity that allows Guatemalan military
officers to traffic drugs, many of the country's elected officials
seem to be going in the opposite direction. Not long after the Bush
administration named the two retired cofradia intelligence chiefs as
suspected drug traffickers, members of the Guatemalan Republican
Front, or FRG party, which was founded by another retired army
general, introduced legislation in the Guatemalan Congress that would
remove civilian oversight over the military in criminal justice matters.

Throughout the Cold War period, Guatemala's civil justice system
seldom had the opportunity to try officers for any crime. Instead
officials submitted themselves to military tribunals. In the 1990s,
civilian courts began for the first time tentatively to exert their
authority to process military officers for crimes like drug
trafficking. But the proposed legislation stipulates that any officer,
whether active duty or retired, may only be tried in a military
tribunal, no matter what the alleged crime. A court martial is
normally reserved for crimes allegedly committed by military personnel
in the course of their service. If this law is passed, however, it
would ensure that Guatemalan officers accused of any crime, from
murder to drug trafficking, could once again only be tried by their
military peers.

"This would be a new mechanism of impunity," noted Jose Zeitune of the
Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and author of a 2005
report on the Guatemalan judiciary.

As Chairman, Ballenger accused the FRG party, which enjoys a plurality
in the Guatemalan Congress, of drug corruption. The FRG was founded by
Ret. Gen. Efrain Rios Montt. A controversial figure, he launched a
coup d'etat in 1982 to become president of Guatemala just as the
intelligence officers of la cofradia were rising.

The new vice-chairman of the Western Hemisphere subcommittee is Jerry
Weller III, a Republican from Illinois. He recently married Zury Rios
Sosa, who is Ret. Gen. Montt's daughter. Unlike other members of the
Subcommittee, Weller, through his spokesman, Telly Lovelace, declined
all comment for this article.

Congressman Weller's father-in-law groomed Guatemala's last president,
an FRG member named Alfonso Portillo, who fled the country in 2004 to
escape his own arrest for alleged money laundering, according to a
State Department report. During President Portillo's tenure, one of
his closest companions inside the National Palace was the cofradia
co-founder Ortega Menaldo, according to Guatemalan press accounts.

Today the shadowy structures of Guatemala's intelligence commands are
so embedded with organized crime that the Bush administration, for
one, is already calling in the United Nations. Putting aside its usual
criticisms of the international body, the administration supports a
proposal to form a U.N.-led task force explicitly called the
"Commission for the Investigation of Illegal Armed Groups and
Clandestine Security Apparatus" in Guatemala. So far the only nation
to yield its sovereignty to allow the United Nations a similar role is
Lebanon, where U.N. investigators are digging into the murder of a
former prime minister.

The proposed U.N. plan for Guatemala also enjoys the support of its
new president, Oscar Berger, a wealthy landowner and lawyer who is
well respected by the U.S. administration. But the proposed U.N.
Commission is encountering resistance from FRG politicians like
Weller's wife, Rios Sosa, who is also an FRG congresswoman.

So what are U.S. officials and Guatemalan authorities doing to stop
the military officers involved in drug trafficking?

"In terms of public corruption against both the army and others,
[Guatemalan authorities] have a number of investigations underway,
right now," then-Assistant Secretary Robert B. Charles said earlier
this year at a State Department press conference. But, in keeping with
past practices, not one of these suspected officers has been charged
in either Guatemala or the United States.

More troubling still is a recent case involving those Mexican
soldiers-turned-hitmen, the Zetas. This past October 22, seven members
of the Zetas were arrested in a Guatemalan border town with weapons
and cocaine. The Associated Press reported that, according to
Guatemalan authorities, the Zetas came to avenge one of their members
who had been killed in Guatemala. Despite the evidence against the
men, a little more than a week after their arrests, Guatemalan
authorities inexplicably set them free.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been writing about
Guatemalan drug trafficking since 1991 in publications including The
Progressive, The Sacramento Bee, The Washington Post, The Village Voice,
The New Republic, Salon.com and The Wall Street Journal. He has been a
special correspondent for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The
Economist. He is a contributor to Crimes of War: What the Public Should
Know, edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff. His clips are posted at
http://www.franksmyth.com.