News Item: A Plan to Restore Order in Guatemala
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A Plan to Restore Order in Guatemala
Thanks to drug cartels, the murder rate, 41 per 100,000 inhabitants, is double that of Mexico.
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY, The Wall Street Journal
Published: Feb. 27, 2012, p. A13, also available online at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203918304577241544246575420.html
Guatemala City
There is no shortage of Latin American politicians, who, having been staunch advocates of the war on drugs during their time in power, suddenly find enlightenment about the futility of drug prohibition once they leave office.
Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina is the opposite. During his campaign for president last fall he talked about escalating the drug war. Now, weeks into his presidency he is talking up legalization as the only way to reduce violence, and he is trying to rally other Latin American governments to join him in challenging the doomed U.S. policy.
In an interview at the national palace here earlier this month, Mr. Pérez Molina told me that he believes at least some of his counterparts in the region are ready to join him in pressuring Washington to rethink an agenda that has fueled a boom in criminality in their countries while doing nothing to contain American drug consumption.
"The president of Mexico [Felipe Calderón], after five years of the effort he has made, has told me that he believes we have to sit down and talk seriously about decriminalization in order to find an alternative approach." The president of Colombia [Juan Manuel Santos] "has more or less" the same view, Mr. Pérez Molina said.
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President Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala
It is notable that the rhetoric we are hearing against the drug war is not coming from anti-American, left-wing demagogues trying to promote populist, nationalist ideals by stirring up the mob. Today's most vocal proponents of a change in regional drug policy are center-right governments. Their proposals are driven by observing 40 years of failure.
Mr. Pérez Molina puts it this way: "What I have seen is that we do not have the necessary forces nor the capacity to reduce drug trafficking." Take the case of Colombia: "Everyone talks about how the big cartels have disappeared. But they have multiplied into small cartels, and the drugs keep coming out of Colombia. If in so many years we have not managed to achieve the desired results, we have to think about how we have failed and about a different approach."
For now, Mr. Pérez Molina says he will try to raise the cost for traffickers of passing through Guatemala. He is deploying the military along key transit routes—in the Péten jungle and on the Suchiate River—with the goal of forcing the gangsters to use other pathways to the north.
"In Mexico, he says, "the cartels must control the territory because it is obvious that they need it to reach and get across the U.S. border. Here in Guatemala things are different, because [traffickers] can look for an alternate route. They are agile, and when there is pressure in one place they shift to another." Since Guatemala has increased the pressure, the president says, they "now find the north of Honduras easier."
To be sure, not all crime here is a direct result of drug-trafficking cartels. But the violence has a connection to cartel activity because the presence of powerful mafiosos implies a collapse of the state, a breakdown of institutions, an increase in impunity and, therefore, an expansion of all crime. To get an idea of how bad things have gotten, consider that the murder rate here in 2011 was 41 per 100,000 inhabitants versus 20 per 100,000 in Mexico.
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Re-establishing state authority in urban areas is key to bringing down the nation's high rates of homicide, extortion and kidnapping. To attack these problems the president says that he will add 10,000 recruits to the police force of 25,000 over the next four years and create an oversight unit designed to monitor police activity. A special task force and a new special prosecutor will target criminal rings operating out of prisons, where an estimated 60%-80% of extortions originate. There will also be more money in the judiciary budget.
Restoring order is, on some level, a matter of political will, and Mr. Pérez Molina says he is committed to personally monitoring the effort to recover public trust in institutions. Until now, he says, "there has been a great lack of confidence in which the people say don't go to the police to make an accusation because [the police] are protecting the extortionists." In this environment, gangsters feel free to demand payments from individuals across the socio-economic spectrum. Bus drivers have been favorite targets and those who won't pay end up dead.
The president's ideas sound like progress. Yet he admits that drug money will remain a problem. "They have every opportunity to penetrate and corrupt the police, prosecutors and judges, and it gets into other institutions" as well. Money laundering, he points out, means banking systems are also corrupted.
The president says that "as long as you maintain the demand there will be supply," but that's not his only gripe with the U.S. It identifies the cartels and thugs in Latin America. But "who in the U.S. is receiving and distributing the drugs," he asks, and why don't we ever hear about them? Mr. Pérez Molina is not the only Latin American who wants to know.
Write to O'Grady@wsj.com
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