Guatemalan President Molina walks with his El Salvadoran counterpart Funes at the presidential house in Guatemala City (Jorge Lopez/Courtesy Reuters).
This is a guest post by Natalie Kitroeff, a research associate here at the Council on Foreign Relations who works with me in the Latin America program. She received her BA from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina has been acting strange lately. Just one month after his inauguration, he is already ruffling U.S. feathers, and making waves in the politics of the region in unexpected ways.
Pérez Molina’s military past and hard-line “mano dura” security policy made many worry that he would backtrack on justice reforms led by the UN Commission against Impunity (CICIG) and the new Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz. Instead, the new president has come out in support of these institutions. Last week he announced that when CICIG’s mandate runs out in 2013, he plans on extending it for another two years without seeking congressional approval. This preemptive decision was in response to a lawsuit filed last month against Álvaro Colom, alleging that CICIG has no right to be in the country because the executive branch bypassed congress to approve its current mandate. The interior minister followed up by asking CICIG to vet his staff to identify any links they may have with organized crime. Vowing to keep Paz y Paz on board for the foreseeable future, Pérez Molina has also stayed neutral as her office tries former de facto President Efraín Ríos Montt on crimes against humanity charges for his role in the civil war (in which the current president was deeply involved).
But after this string of pleasant surprises, Pérez Molina’s most recent about face has drawn annoyance and even anger from the United States. Last Saturday he raised the possibility of legalizing drugs in Central America, saying he’d put the debate on the table in future meetings with regional leaders. He followed through on this promise on Monday, when he discussed decriminalization with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes (who first agreed to consider the option, and later retracted facing pressure from Washington). The U.S. Embassy in Guatemala responded with a swift condemnation of the proposal.
So what is Pérez Molina’s endgame? A popular theory is that he’s trying to pressure the United States into lifting its ban on weapons sales to Guatemala, instituted in 1978 due to the military’s role in human rights abuses during the civil conflict. This makes sense. The president has spoken openly and frequently about his desire to buy U.S. arms, pressing the issue with head of Southern Command Douglas Fraser during their meeting last November (Fraser said the embargo may well be lifted in the near future). Threatening to decriminalize drugs as a last resort solution the problem of organized crime could pressure the United States to offer an alternative: renewed military aid.
But Pérez Molina may also be making a more ambitious attempt to alter the long-standing foundations of U.S. relations with Guatemala and Central America more broadly. The six-country region has largely been an afterthought in U.S. security cooperation with Latin America, which has historically centered on the larger economies of Colombia and Mexico. In FY2013 Central America will receive $60 million in U.S. security aid– less than half of the funds destined for Colombia and a third of total aid to Mexico – and of that Guatemala gets a paltry $2 million. Meanwhile, Pérez Molina inherited a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world, and an impunity rate of 95 percent (meaning just 5 in every 100 crimes are solved).
The legalization debate is a way of putting Central America – and Guatemala in particular – on the United States’ radar screen. It is also a way of asserting the country’s autonomy from Washington. Pérez Molina joins a long list of leaders calling for decriminalization, including former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia. In an era of waning American influence in Latin America, he may to be trying to align Guatemala more closely with its regional partners, pulling a country long beholden to the United States out from under its powerful shadow.
Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.
At least 27 people were found dead in the Guatemalan village near the border with Mexico last May. Police look at a message written with a victim's blood, which reads: ‘What’s up, Otto Salguero, you bastard? We are going to find you and behead you, too. Sincerely, Z200.’ (Courtesy Reuters).
In the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s recent hearing, “Has Merida Evolved? Part One: The Evolution of Drug Cartels and the Threat to Mexico’s Governance,” Committee Chairman Connie Mack (R-Fla), among others, expressed his support for a U.S. counterinsurgency program (COIN) to fight Mexican drug traffickers. Calling the cartels “a well-funded criminal insurgency raging along our southern border,” Mack said the only way to win the drug war is through an “all U.S. agency” COIN approach, which would require greater U.S. military involvement.
I’d tend to agree instead with this article by Patrick Corocan, which says that sending U.S. troops into Mexico will not provide a long-term solution to the country’s security challenges, first because the nature of narco-violence is distinct from that of an insurgency (so a COIN response to it would be inappropriate) and because of the “practical difficulties” involved in such an approach (including a popular backlash to it in Mexico).
This week the U.S. Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control released its report, “Responding to Violence in Central America,” which draws attention to the rapid escalation of violence in the region – most of it tied to the ramped up activity of organized crime, as detailed by the Woodrow Wilson Center study I discussed last week. The report offers a number of policy recommendations to deal with the problem, the most critical (and innovative) of which include placing more emphasis on extraditions of drug traffickers to the United States, improving witness protection programs and expanding cooperation between U.S. law enforcement and regional counterparts. It also notes that while U.S. security assistance for Central America has grown over the past three years, it is likely to stagnate – or even decline – in the future, making it even more critical for countries in the region to seek other sources of security funding by reaching out to other donors and to the domestic private sector.
Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Narco Killings 2011 Map (Courtesy WM Consulting).
There has been much debate in Mexico about the number of drug-related killings since the start of drug war in 2006. The Mexican government provides an official database that puts this figure at some 35,000. Others, such as Reforma, provide an estimate near the official number — but more current — now totalling some 37,000.
As important as the total numbers is their breakdown. Here, the Mexican government provides some estimates, sorting the murders according to whether they were acts of aggression, executions or occurred as a result of a confrontation. Walter McKay at WM Consulting has built a useful tool by scouring local newspapers in many (but not yet all) Mexican states. This map depicts the murders according to whether the victim was a civilian, politician (or other high profile individual), or law enforcement official, and also shows the sites of car bombs and mass graves. McKay puts the number of deaths as a result of the drug war at some 47,000, significantly higher than the government estimate. As the policy debates continue, these various sources of information will be vital to informing steps forward.
This week the Woodrow Wilson Center released its report, “Organized Crime in Central America: The Northern Triangle”, which has many well researched and written chapters on the accelerated rise of criminal structures over the past three decades in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. To bolster weak rule of law institutions vulnerable to the influence of organized crime in the region, it argues, the U.S. will need to contribute more funds to the region’s security initiatives – even as individual countries play a greater part by collecting more taxes. Though overall the picture is disheartening, this useful study lays out the complex factors underlying the violence in Central America today.
It also shows that while all Central American nations struggle with crime and violence, the real security challenges are in the Northern Triangle – where the magnitude and type of organized criminal operations are unparalleled. This finding questions the traditional blanket regional approach taken by the United States (through CARSI), or the way other Latin American or European countries develop multilateral security initiatives within Central America.
Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.
