May 1, 2013

Paved with Good Intentions:
Canada’s development NGOs from idealism to imperialism
By Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay
Fernwood Publishing, Black Point, NS, 2012
302 pages, $24.95 (Canadian) paperback.

IN ONE SENSE, I came of age with regard to the problems with Canadian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) around the same time that Nikolas Barry-Shaw and Dru Oja Jay’s new book Paved with Good Intentions was conceived. In late 2003 I had stayed for four months in Johannesburg, South Africa on a journalism internship where I hung around with dedicated grassroots activists who, after years of struggle against apartheid, were organizing against the policies of the African National Congress.

Their struggles were against privatization and displacement, and in favor of economic justice. Every meeting, demonstration, dinner and march meant an inspiring mix of old school trade unionists and commies, militant women, and younger anti-capitalist and anti-colonial fighters. I began to learn what popular resistance against the state and capitalist democracy looks like.

The Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) would not have approved, but it funded the trip and a monthly stipend, organized through the Montreal-based NGO Alternatives. Yet not long after I returned from South Africa, I learned that the same person responsible for setting interns up with the comrades and fighters in Africa was also promoting groups in Haiti hostile to the leftwing Lavalas movement, publishing an article reprinted in a major Montreal newspaper criminalizing the resistance movements and those close to ousted president Jean Bertrand Aristide.

Upon learning about this seeming contradiction, I joined other former Alternatives interns in signing off on a letter expressing my discontent with the organization’s role in Haiti. It seemed to me at the time that the people and organizations of Haiti were being sacrificed by Alternatives staff in order to secure money that would allow them to do the projects they really cared about, in South Africa or elsewhere.

My experience with Alternatives taught me that very few things with regards to Non-Governmental Organizations are clear cut or straightforward. Barry-Shaw and Jay’s new book is a useful starting place from which activists can broaden our understanding around one segment of what INCITE Women of Color Against Violence dubbed “the non-profit industrial complex.”

Structures of Cooptation

Identifying the patterns and recounting the history of development NGOs in Canada brings the systematic tendencies of these organizations into focus. Understanding the structural features of these groups can help us build a stronger analysis of how we can effectively support each other and avoid the co-optation of peoples’ struggles.

Paved with Good Intentions sets out to “avoid the risk of over-generalizing by laying emphasis on those relationships and characteristics that are common to virtually all development NGOs: their professionalized, bureaucratic structure and their dependence on government funding for maintaining that structure.” This challenging task results in a text that often feels detail-laden, but for those interested in the intricacies of the politics of development, this is also part of the book’s richness.

The two Montreal-based writers meticulously document the rise of Canadian NGOs, which they posit accompanied the imposition of austerity programs and neoliberal economic policy in the majority world. In step with the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment programs, they write, there were 146 “IMF riots” throughout the global south between 1976 and 1992.

“In some places anti-IMF protests forced snap elections or toppled governments, while in other places police or military repression was used to contain social unrest,” write Barry-Shaw and Jay. “NGOs were identified as ideal vehicles for tackling ‘social costs’ on the cheap.” Canada was on the leading edge of the transformation of NGOs into agencies responsible for promoting “adjustment with a human face.”

As neoliberalism became entrenched, the role of development NGOs began to expand, becoming what geographer David Harvey calls “privatization by NGO.”

The Case of Haiti

Haiti, which the authors say has the world’s highest concentration of NGOs per capita, provides a complex case study in everything that can go wrong with foreign aid. This critique extends deep into the decimation of local social movements and the repeated undermining of democracy, as President Aristide was twice ousted and his Lavalas party demonized. “Loud, public, and deeply exaggerated criticism of the Lavalas government seemed to be a requirement for receiving foreign funding,” write Barry-Shaw and Jay.

Arriving in Port-Au-Prince, signs of NGO dominance are all over the place. “White 4×4 SUV bearing the logos of various organizations clog the streets of Port-au-Prince, while billboards declare, ‘Avis is the preferred rental car company of NGOs!’”

An internal brain drain created when educated young Haitians began to choose higher paying NGO jobs meant “the weaker and more hollowed out the state became, the more justification the donors had for routing aid around the government.”

NGO involvement in Haiti deepened with the January 12, 2010 earthquake that devastated the country. “Before the earthquake, there were an estimated 10,000 NGOs operating in Haiti, but since 12 January it has been simply impossible to keep track of the number,” according to Kevin Edmonds at the University of Toronto.

One particularly telling example of how aid can be deadly came when the U.S. government pressured the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti to destroy all of the island’s “Creole” pigs during an outbreak (1978) of African Swine Flu.

“The hearty Creole pigs subsisted on food waste and foraging, and functioned as a savings bank for peasants to pay for expenses like funerals, doctor’s visits, or school fees: when the time came, they could slaughter or sell the pig,” write Barry-Shaw and Jay. “The eradication program effectively wiped out the savings of virtually the entire peasantry.” CIDA and USAID tried to introduce a new pig stock in Haiti. The project failed miserably.

It is in these specific stories that Paved with Good Intentions is at its strongest, providing concrete examples of how so-called development assistance in practice creates dependency, serves one or more fractions of the economic elite, and further impoverishes the world’s poorest people.

The example of Haiti’s Creole pig cull demonstrates how international governments conspired to make life a whole lot harder for the Haitian poor, and suggests that in Haiti’s Creole pig economy was a source of resources and autonomy among the poor.

Self-Help or Fightback

Later on, Barry-Shaw and Jay retreat into a strange dichotomy between the role of the state and NGOs with regard to informal economies in the south more generally. This dichotomy seems to arise as a function of their astute critique of micro-finance as a form of “NGO assisted self help.”

The authors describe the informal economy as “home to countless tiny labour intensive ‘businesses’ — roadside vegetable stands, home-based artisans, open-air repair shops, street corner hawkers — whose prospects for growth were severely limited.” They quote Thomas Dichter, who states that “The informal sector in most places is in fact a default mode, a function of failing economies…These markets are not the way out of poverty; they are driven by it.”

The solution, it is intoned, would be in increased government participation in providing services to the world’s poor. Barry-Shaw and Jay note that a study on microfinance “found little evidence for the presumed superiority of NGOs over governments, whether it was with respect to quality of services, reaching the poorest, or efficiency.”

While their critique of microfinance is right on, informal economies and their role in the global south are far more complex and vibrant than a lineup of desperate vegetable hawkers in default mode.

Indeed, the very terminology of the informal economy privileges state capitalism. “To call it ‘informal’ suggests ceding a central place to the established economy, hegemonized by the ruling classes,” writes Uruguayan social movement theorist Raul Zibechi. Zibechi draws from Peruvian writer José Matos Mar, who centers these non-official economies and describes them as oppositional — not just to microfinance programs and NGOs but also to the army, trade unions, established businesses and the state.

Barry-Shaw and Jay’s treatment of the informal economy is an off-key side note in an otherwise strong work, but it provides one example of where there is room for more developed thinking and reflection around alternatives to NGO privatization and to stronger state control over autonomous sectors.

The intricacies of issues like the informal economy are often illuminated through conversations and personal relationships, which the authors appear to have with regards to Haiti. Parts of Paved with Good Intentions, however, rely heavily on experts and academics, which may be useful from an informational point of view but which are generally far less compelling than real life examples.

Blunting Resistance

Barry-Shaw and Jay convincingly argue that Canadian NGOs actively avoid encouraging meaningful participation of their members in anything beyond fundraising. They shift the lens to the role of development NGOs in blunting resistance movements in Canada, with a focus on summits like the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Vancouver in 1997, the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City in 2001, and the now famous World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in 1999.

Paved with Good Intentions refutes the oft-repeated notion that NGOs deserve credit for the convergences around these summits. “Once swelling protests became large and militant enough to scare Western elites pushing trade agreements, development NGOs donned the mantle of ‘global civil society’… NGOs lent their credibility to elites as part of an effort to ‘rebrand’ neoliberalism while denouncing direct action protesters in the same terms they used to describe police violence.”

Barry-Shaw and Jay take a microscope to Oxfam, producing revealing details about corporate funding, the organization’s cozy relationship with the World Bank, and its institutional swing towards promoting a gentler form of capitalism.

They note that federal funds for development NGOs in Canada grew from less than $90 million in 1980 to more than $662 million in 1992. These impressive numbers  back up the authors’ perspective that development NGOs have taken on an increasingly imperialist role over the past decades.

That said, it is hard to put these numbers into context without being able to make a comparison between Canada’s aid funding and, for example, that of the United States. That Canada spends less than its southern neighbors does not absolve it from responsibility, but in order to put these programs and Canadian imperialism into context, some comparisons with the U.S. and other nations’ foreign aid programs would have been of use.

In the final chapters, Paved with Good Intentions places Canadian NGOs firmly within the frame of counterinsurgency, arguing that the “distinction between warfare and development work was effectively erased by Western counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan.” The book ends where it started, in Haiti, with a final look at how Canadian NGOs helped put a friendly face on an unelected government, even as violence became so intense that the morgue in Port au Prince was overwhelmed with as many as 600 bodies in a day.

One of my outstanding questions after reading Paved with Good Intentions is the usefulness of the term Non-Governmental Organization. Barry-Shaw and Jay introduce the difficulties at the outset. “The term ‘non-governmental organization’ is notoriously vague; it defines organizations by what they are not, and its porous boundaries can cause much confusion,” they write.

In fact, as Barry-Shaw and Jay point out, the organizations they refer to as NGOs are generally government-funded. It might have been useful for the authors to give some more careful thought to using an alternative language around NGOs — developing something akin to INCITE’s “non-profit industrial complex,” perhaps.

Ten years after I took  the plane to Johannesburg, I continue to write about popular movements and repressive strategies. Today, most of my work is centered around Mexico (see “Drug War Capitalism,” ATC July/August 2012, http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3652). One of the most consistent reflections I have at the level of writing about what is taking place in Mexico, or elsewhere, is how the language we have to describe much of what is taking place language that comes from the state.

“Talking like a state,” as it is described by Paul Gootenberg, can prevent accurate, efficient communication about systems of repression as well as modes of resistance. Undoing state language by re-naming NGOs something closer to what they in fact are may have made the contribution of Paved an even more important one.

On balance, Barry-Shaw and Jay find that “NGOs do more harm than good overall,” a strong position that is sure to be met with a certain level of resistance by NGO workers and their allies. Whether you agree or disagree, Paved with Good Intentions is an important resource, filled with well-researched examples that go a long way towards backing up their conclusion.

Sources

Zibechi, Raul. Territories in Resistance: The Political Cartography of Latin America, AK Press, 2012, page 227.

Edmonds, Kevin. “Beyond Good Intentions: The Structural Limitations of NGOs in Haiti.” Critical Sociology. 1-14, 2012, page 2.

Gootenberg, Paul. “Talking About the Flow: Drugs, Borders, and the Discourse of Drug Control.” Cultural Critique, 71, Winter 2009, University of Minnesota Press, page 36.

May/June 2013, ATC 164

May 6, 2013

For six years, Juan Carlos Trujillo Herrera worked alongside his three brothers as an undocumented migrant in the United States. When he was deported back to Mexico in 2001, Trujillo Herrera went to work in his home state of Michoacán, with the dream of building a small business where his brothers could eventually return home and join him.

Over time, he managed to get a business started buying and selling gold and precious metals and convinced his youngest brother, Raúl, to return to Mexico. Less than four months after his return, Raúl was kidnapped, together with another brother, Salvador, and five others from their work crew while driving through Guerrero state, never to be seen or heard from again. In September of 2010, two more of Trujillo Herrera’s brothers were kidnapped while on their way to work in Veracruz, along with two others.

“All that’s come to us by moving back to Mexico is to lose our family,” said Trujillo Herrera. For the Trujillo Herrera family, the desire to be reunified and together in their home country resulted in the tragic disappearances of four brothers.

According to Marco Antonio Castillo, who works with the Popular Association of Migrant Families in Mexico City, the spike in murders and disappearances that accompanied the United States-backed war on drugs has had a devastating impact on migrants and their families. “It’s very ironic that Mexican and US governments speak about a war on drugs when the numbers and the consequences of it have shown that this war is against people and migrants,” Castillo told Truthout during an interview in Mexico City.

Castillo and others who support the rights of migrants and their families in Mexico, organized events and a protest timed with Barack Obama’s arrival last weekend in the country.During his first visit to Mexico as president more than four years ago, he said he was committed to comprehensive immigration reform. But this time, Obama can finally show some progress, in the form of the “Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act” a bill introduced in the Senate April 17.

The 844-page bill touches on everything from banning repeat drunk drivers from the United States to more money for drones on the border and the promotion of Canadian tourism. It also includes provisions that could impact many of the more than 30 million noncitizens living in the United States today, including the introduction of a “blue card” which would allow some farmworkers to apply for temporary residency, which could lead to green cards and eventually citizenship. However, those who qualify for the “Pathway to Citizenship” will not have access to most health care or welfare benefits for at least 10 years. The bill also creates W visas, which in theory will allow agricultural workers to change employers.

For some, there is guarded optimism about some of the provisions of the bill.

The bill provides new protections for workers during the recruitment process. “Before, there was no protection during the recruitment process; now the law proposes various points . . . that could positively affect people” who are planning to travel to the United States on agricultural workers’ visas, said Lilian López, an outreach coordinator with Mexico City’s Centro de los Derechos del Migrante (CDM). She says if the new bill is made law, workers will be better informed about where they will work, who their employer will be and what the timelines are for their trip. In addition, according to López, the bill stipulates that employers must pay all expenses for their workers to arrive to work, including visa fees and transportation. “There are court cases that obligated employers to pay, but only through court cases. It was never explicit in the law. Now, these protections will be contained within the law,” she said.

Others are less optimistic about the possibility that the proposed immigration reform will live up to their hopes and expectations.

“When it was announced, we thought that finally the US government was going to recognize fully the contribution of recent migrants from the past 20 to 30 years, but then, as it became a negotiation between ultraconservative groups with less conservative groups, it became clear that it became more of a discussion centered on national security, more than on human values,” said Castillo. “Today, we’re pretty disappointed in what’s been offered to us.”

Primary among his concerns are that Mexicans previously deported from the United States will still face harsh barriers in gaining status in the country; that young people who grew up in the United States, but were deported to Mexico, will continue to face difficult futures in both countries; and that family reunification will remain elusive for many.

Major provisions in the bill resulted from negotiations between the American Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, as well as United Farmworkers and other groups. All of the Chamber of Commerce criteria are included in the bill (more border security, more temporary workers, tight criteria for citizenship and a “balanced and workable employment verification system”). Some even say the bill could become a financial windfall for corporate America. According to a recentarticle in the Wall Street Journal, “immigration reform would offer an economic stimulus far superior to anything Mr. Obama has come close to delivering in his first four years.”

The economic motivations behind the agreement have raised concerns among advocates. “We see that at the root of the migration reform there are political and economic interests and not humane or justice-oriented interests,” said Rubén Figueroa, himself a former migrant to the United States who now supports Central Americans crossing Mexico on their way to the United States. “If there aren’t specific agreements around labor and human rights, they’ll become slaves with documents.”

The majority of Central Americans crossing Mexico do so as undocumented migrants, and their journey is perilous because of organized crime and corruption among Mexican police and immigration officials. Multiple massacres of migrants have taken place in Mexico since former president Felipe Calderón launched the war on drugs in 2006. The $3 billion plus in the US bill slated for reinforcing the border wall and stepping up drones and enforcement along the border is a frontal assault on their safety and mobility, many feel.

Members of Mexico’s financial elite, who see the health of the Mexican economy as tied directly to growth in the United States, have also applauded immigration reform. “For the United States, immigration reform is fundamental, because immigration reform will provide a demographic structure that is much wider, much younger, with a workforce that will allow them to maintain Social Security, which is very expensive to public finances, and it will permit important rates of growth in sectors in which the United States has lost competitiveness,” said Luis Tellez, the president of the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores (BMV) during a presentation in Mexico City in mid-April.

But the growth of the Mexican economy, spurred by deregulation and deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement, does not mean there are less people looking to go to the United States. Instead, the destruction of internal markets and price structures linked to agricultural activities has made survival for many in rural Mexico a question of migrate or die.

For Don Arias, a 40-year-old father of three who is preparing to leave his home in the southern state of Tabasco, Mexico, to work on a crab farm in the United States, the decision to go to the United States was of pure need. “There’s a lack of work here in Mexico; the problem is totally economic,” he told Truthout. “The situation right now is a little difficult.” He said he has no interest in staying to live in the United States and would prefer to stay in Mexico, but there is no way he can support his family with the wages he would earn here. From the United States, he is able to send home up to $300 a week to his family. Working full time in Mexico, he might clear $40 a week.

Don Arias was aware of the possibility of immigration reform in the United States, but wasn’t aware of the details. He said a more just system would, in his opinion, allow workers to change employers, as his current visa status requires him to stay with a single employer, regardless of whether or not there is work.

In addition to the economic hardships that many Mexicans face, violence has surged linked to the drug war, with approximately 120,000 homicides over the past six years and another 27,000 people reported disappeared.

Throughout the militarization of Mexico and the rise in violence, the United States has maintained that US-Mexico relations are the closest in history. While Obama focused on the Immigration Reform Bill during his visit to Mexico, it should not be evaluated apart from his administration’s support for the drug war, which, it is felt, goes a long way toward undermining justice and security for migrants and their families.

The multiple tragedies lived by the Trujillo Herrera family shows how high the stakes can be for people who are deported or who decide to return to Mexico after living in the United States. In Trujillo Herrera’s case, his desire to unify his family in the context of increasing violence led to events he never thought possible, and it has given him a new mission in life. “Today I don’t want to go back to the US, I have no interest in going back,” he said. “But I do want to find every single person who has been disappeared in Mexico.”

May 2, 2013

Obama last visited Mexico during the G-20 summit in Los Cabos last June. He and his entourage will touch down again today for talks with Mexico’s new president, Enrique Peña Nieto. Since his election,Peña Nieto’s team has worked to shift media focus away from violence related to the drug war and towards the economy, something that will likely be reinforcedduring this visit.

According to the New York Times, “In Mexico, Mr. Obama plans to meet with President Enrique Peña Nieto for talks that the Mexican foreign ministry said earlier ‘will cover competiveness [sic], education and innovation, along with border infrastructure, commerce, migration and citizen security among other subjects of shared interest.’”

Competitiveness

Competitiveness is a preferred term that governments use today to talk about privatization and regulatory reforms designed to benefit the corporate sector. Previously, competitiveness was known as austerity, structural adjustment,or privatization, terms that have fallen out of favor due to the harsh consequences of these programs on the population at large.

So with respect to competitiveness, what might Obama and Peña Nieto discuss? Well, for one, Mexico recently changed their labor laws in order to “increase competitiveness,” pushing down minimum wage to about 60¢ an hourand making it more difficult for workers to receive social security and regular workweeks.

Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil firm, will definitely be a topic of conversation. According to the Financial Times, “an opening of Mexico’s highly protected oil sector, which is dominated by state behemoth Pemex, could provide untold opportunities for US oil companies as well as the sort of technology-transfer Mexico desperately needs.”With all the talk of the gains to be achieved through privatizing Mexico’s oil sector, the fact that 99 percent of the state owned oil company’s profits go towards the federal budget, representing about 40 percent of the total national budget, will probably be sidestepped. Full privatization of Pemex would mean harsh austerity throughout the country.

In addition, the US funds something called the Mexico Competitiveness Program through the US Agency for International Development (USAID). According to the agency, “USAID is working with Mexican partners to improve economic governance and increase private sector competitiveness by improving the business enabling environment and by building sustainable support for continued policy reforms and systemic changes.” This means funding Mexican think tanks and non-governmental organizations to promote business friendly policies, privatization, and US backed reforms to the justice sector.

Education & Innovation

On December 11th, ten days after taking power, the Government of Mexico changed two articles of the Constitution, resulting in what they are calling an education reform. The focus on mandatory testing for all teachers has generated controversy, as, among other things, it makes teachers into increasingly precarious workers who can be fired for failing a test. “What was approved isn’t an education reform, rather a labor and administrative reform in disguise,” wrote columnist Luis Hernández Navarro in La Jornada. In the same column, Hernández maintained that the legislation opens the pathway to the privatization of the education system.

There has long been pressure from organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change the education system in Mexico. In a December 2012 press release announcing the renewal of a $73 billion credit line for Mexico, the IMF called for reforms to the education system, among other things. Peña Nieto has already earned the admiration of the International Monetary Fund, whose leaders say they are “very impressed with President Peña Nieto’s structural reform agenda.”

Mass protests against the education reform have taken place across the country. On April 18th, a record 250,000teachers, students, and their supporters are estimated to have marched in Guerrero against the reform and for free and public education.

The US corporate sector has a lot riding on innovation and education in Mexico. “With Mexico able to provide US companies with young, skilled and cheap labor, and with the US able to play a potentially crucial role in the transfer of technology and know-how to its southern neighbor, there is clearly plenty of room for the two administrations to push ahead with further economic integration,” according to a recent article in Financial Times. General Electric has an important center for research and design in Querétaro, which is fast becoming home to the country’s mostimportant aerospace cluster. Engineers, 115,000 of which graduate in Mexico each year, are particularly sought after, as they can be hired here for less than $1,000 a month. This is a crucial element in Mexico’s ability to attract foreign direct investment in advanced manufacturing. According to data from Mexico’s Secretary of the Economy, the number of aerospace companies in Mexico rose from 61 to 249 between 2005 and 2011. Eighty-five percent of aerospace exports are to the United States.

Border infrastructure, Migration & Citizen Security

Obama will likely promote the immigration reform bill that is before the US Senate. The bill comes in at over 800 pages, and places immigration squarely within the context of national security. There are positives and negatives to the proposal, which aims to ensure an adequate and flexible labor force in the US. While some workers mayeventually achieve the “pathway to citizenship” offered through the reform, other prospective migrants will be directly impacted by its political tradeoff, an expanded border wall and even more militarization along the US’s southernborder.

There’s a demand from the corporate sector to build new border crossings and expand existing ones between Mexico and the US. “Financially, investment in border crossings and infrastructure has not matched the exponential increase in trade crossing the border each year,” reads a December memo from the Council on Foreign Relations. This border infrastructure is necessary for the maquila (assembly) industry in Mexico to expand, and the US requires Mexico’s cooperation on these crossings, the construction of which amount to huge subsidies for the US and other corporations with operations along the US/Mexico border.

In terms of “citizen security” it is plain as day that violence in Mexico has risen in tandem with the implementation of the Merida Initiative, a US backed strategy militarizing the transshipment and production of narcotics. Over 120,000 people have been murdered and at least 27,000 disappeared since the beginning of the “drug war” in December,2006.

Many of the dead and missing are migrants and “non-citizens,” Mexico has increasingly become one huge border for Central Americans, where the enforcers are not only immigration police but also the army and organized crime groups. It’s likely the presidential talks will skirt the ongoing violence in Mexico and focus more on police training and community programs, which are the supposed positive aspects of the Merida Initiative. Talking about the “drug war” probably the last thing Peña Nieto wants to do while sharing the spotlight with Obama.

April 23, 2013

BENITO JUÁREZ, MEXICO—It was a day he’ll never forget, but it began like any other for Erick Solorio Solís, an engineering senior at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua (UACh) in Chihuahua, Mexico. He rolled out of bed on Monday, October 22, 2012, and stepped into the warm morning air that graces Chihuahua City through the fall. He had a bite to eat, and took a quick call from his parents, who were heading to the city to visit him and his brothers later that day. Solorio, a tall young man with inquisitive eyebrows and a trace of a beard, went to school and sat through three hours of classes. He recalls that he left campus around noon. With his two brothers, then-21-year-old Solorio spent the next couple of hours at home, waiting for his parents to arrive.

After the morning phone call with their son, Solorio’s parents hopped in their pickup truck and pulled out of Benito Juárez, a rural town a couple hours south of the US border, where the Solorio family has farmed for three generations. Solorio’s mother was due for a check-up in Chihuahua, and his father planned to take advantage of the outing to run a few errands.

Around 2:00 pm, Solorio’s elder brother got a phone call from a local police official. The man said their parents had been involved in an accident. Erick called his uncle, who said his parents had been caught in the middle of a firefight. The brothers went to the offices of El Barzón, a farmers’ rights group their father was involved in, to see what was happening. It was then they found out that their parents had been murdered.

“The first thing we thought was that it was people from our town, the people from the mine,” said Solorio in an interview with The Dominion in Chihuahua City. “The jealousy was too much, the hatred they had towards [my father] because he demonstrated, using facts, that the mine [would be] bad.”Ismael Solorio Urrutia and Manuela Solís Contreras breathed their last breaths seated inside their truck, which was parked beside the highway leading out of the city of Cuautémoc.

According to video footage acquired as part of the investigation into the murder, Ismael pulled his pickup off the road, and turned the car around as if to talk to the driver of a car that had pulled in behind him. As the killer approached, Ismael pulled 160 pesos (about $13) out of his wallet as if planning to pay him. He was still clasping the bills when his body was found.

When I asked Martin Solís Bustamante, a Barzón activist and lifelong friend of the family, how exactly they died, he got up from his chair and walked around behind me, pressing two fingers to my lower skull. Two shots passed through Ismael’s skull and lodged themselves in Manuela’s breast and shoulder, killing her.

Their killings are the first of opponents to Canadian mining in Mexico’s northern Chihuahua state, where, by 2011, mining companies were granted concessions to 54 per cent of the land.

The double murder shocked the people of Benito Juárez, a desert town, population about 12,000. Benito Juárez spreads out from a small central park, where vendors sell ice cream and burritos and elderly men rest on benches in the shade. After a few blocks, the paved roads leaving the park turn into dusty gravel roads, which lead for kilometres into a harsh desert. Water flows from a reservoir at the foot of the Carmen River through a small canal, providing farmers with the raw material for cattle ranching, chilli growing and cotton harvesting, the economic mainstays of the area. Benito Juárez is also an ejido, which means that the 53,000 hectares of land there is collectively owned and farmed by about 400 families.

The road out to where MAG Silver—a Vancouver-based mining exploration firm—was drilling core samples cuts through sun-baked desert plains, flanked by mountains in all directions, the stark landscape interrupted only by chaparral bush and spindly spikes of ocotillo. Without irrigation, little survives here, and securing water in the desert is no small feat. In Benito Juárez, the effort to ensure the survival of the local economy and a way of life based around family and farm is multi-generational and involves hundreds of residents.

Ismael Solorio and Martin Solís, for instance, studied together at an agricultural school in Juárez. Returning to the ejido in the early 1980s, they got their start in activism, organizing in defense of predatory banking practices after the peso was devalued in 1987, and using direct action to help improve the lives of the ejido’s members.

Later, Solorio and Solís helped form the Barzón movement (a barzón is the yoke-ring on a plough), whose members captured the attention of the nation when they entered the country’s national congress on horseback after riding 54 days from the US-Mexico border crossing in Ciudad Juárez to Mexico City. The bold tactics of the Barzonistasbrought back memories of Mexican revolutionaries at the turn of the 20th century. They successfully forced the first change in the rural budget anyone can remember, and later secured electricity subsidies for rural farmers whose livelihoods were under threat following the unequal terms of the North America Free Trade Agreement.

In the last years of his life, Ismael Solorio, who was known to his friends as “Chops,” continued to grow chilli peppers and raise cattle, while devoting his spare time to water and mining issues in the region.  A far cry from a full-time activist, Solorio devoted most of his time to working on the land, speaking out when he felt outside forces threatened the future of his community.

First was a host of off-the-books deep wells drilled by Mennonite farmers which sapped the Carmen River of the flow that had long provided water for farming in Benito Juárez and other desert communities. Then there was MAG Silver, which was carrying out a controversial drilling program at its “Cinco de Mayo” project to explore for silver, gold, copper, molybdenum and tungsten in lands locals claim are communal.

Ismael and and his wife Manuela, a primary school teacher and ardent supporter of her husband’s activism, had faced-off against many powerful forces: banks, governments, and wealthy well drillers. But something was different this time. Tensions rose quickly; the conflict heated up, and in a matter of months Manuela and Ismael were dead. In the months before he was killed, Solorio denounced death threats he received and aggression by people he said were paid by the mining company, and demanded the government provide protection. His requests were ignored.

“Since 1985 we have been involved in different actions and mobilizations as part of social resistance,” said Solís, who spoke to The Dominion from El Barzón’s Chihuahua City headquarters. “We always confronted the government, and we had never confronted organized crime,” said Solís, speaking confidently and steadily.

The decision to kill Manuela and Ismael didn’t come from the head of a drug cartel, Solís emphasized. Far from drug lords, the killer and his accomplices were local men who had been involved in carrying out the dirty work for a crime group known as the Juárez Cartel: “Hit men, armed men, people who previously had threatened Ismael related to the actions he was taking against the mining company,” said Solís.

Dozens of statements collected by police in the months following the murders make it plain that MAG Silver’s exploration program was a source of conflict in Benito Juárez. Testimonies included in the state investigation of the murders, reviewed by The Dominion, include references to men claiming to be plainclothes federal police without badges or a legitimate arrest warrent threatening Ismael, and fights between mine exploration workers and those who didn’t support the mining project. A geologist working for the company was also questioned.

The man believed to be Solorio’s assassin was murdered by police on January 19, 2013, but Solorio’s friends and family refuse to stop their quest for accountability. “We have maintained that justice must be done and the other material authors must be detained, but so must the intellectual authors of this crime,” said Solís.

Today, instead of working in the fields or sitting around a table talking with friends and family, Manuela and Ismael are gone. Their bodies are buried under the desert earth they once farmed. Their names, along with dozens of others, grace a rebel monument erected to remember victims of violence in Chihuahua state, among them other activists, Indigenous community members and young women.

Chihuahua is considered by some to be the most dangerous state in Mexico, with more than 4,480 murders in 2011, the last year for which there are official statistics. The violence isn’t contained in Ciudad Juárez, the notorious border city that until recently was considered the murder capital of the world.

Saul Reyes Salazar, an activist from the Juárez Valley in northern Chihuahua, who fled to Texas with approximately 30 members of his family following the murders of four of his siblings and his sister-in-law, compared killings of activists in Chihuahua with a kind of social cleansing. “We’re not the only ones who have suffered this tragedy,” he said in an interview with The Dominion in an El Paso cafe. “In Chihuahua, there have been more than 40 social, environmental and human rights activists who have been murdered, I consider it like a cleansing…an ideological cleansing.”

Previous conflicts sparked by irresponsible mining in the state include the case of Pan American Silver in the town of Madera, as previously reported in The Dominion.

As October’s double murder echoed through anti-mining networks throughout Mexico, Manuela and Ismael’s names were added to a growing list that already included Mariano Abarca, killed in Chiapas by hitmen connected to Blackfire, a Calgary-owned mining company, in November 2010, and Bernardo Vásquez,murdered March 15, 2012, because of his activism against Vancouver-based Fortuna Silver.

MAG Silver has denied its operations have anything to do with the murders. “MAG and our Mexican consulting contractor, El Cascabel, had absolutely no involvement in the tragic event,” Dan MacInnis, the CEO of MAG Silver, wrote in an email to The Dominion. Instead, MacInnis earlier claimed, “We are victims broadsided by a long-standing community dispute.”

The police investigation into the murders back up the fact that it was a community dispute that triggered acts of violence ending in the murder of Ismael and Manuela. But it also makes clear that the prospect of well paying jobs MAG Silver brought to Benito Juarez was at the heart of the dispute.

“That’s what is so painful for us, you know, the fact that members of the community handed over Ismael and Manuelita, that’s something we know, that here in Benito Juárez the deal was made and everything so that they would be killed,” said Siria Leticia Solís Solís, a long time resident of the community and a member of the Barzón, in an interview with The Dominion. “We blocked the company, and because of that people are being killed,” she said.

Since the killings, mining exploration work in the community has stopped, but tensions haven’t fallen off. In an assembly where more than half the members were present, the ejido of Benito Juárez voted in November of 2012 to ban mining activity on their lands for the next 100 years. The company acknowledged its exploration program in Benito Juárez is currently inactive, claiming it is “working through delays in the exploration permits for its Cinco de Mayo project.”

It is unclear what the future holds for Benito Juárez, a town steeped in mine-related conflict in a region where various armed actors—police, the army and organized crime groups—act with impunity.

One thing seems certain: the rural way of life passed on through generations will continue to provide for families, and locals will do everything in their power to protect the lands and waters from irresponsible use and contamination. For Ismael and Manuela’s youngest son Uriel, orphaned at 18, the lands farmed by his father are the key to his future.

“It’s what I like,” he said, as we drove through the sun-baked roads along his family’s land. “Working with animals, agriculture, and everything related to the farm.”

Click here for more details on how the company’s representatives interacted with theejido of Benito Juárez. Click here to read a letter from members of the Barzón to the Canadian Ambassador to Mexico.

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and editor member of the Media Co-op. Her work is published online at dawnpaley.ca.

April 17, 2013

Quieter is better. That seems to be the motto driving the negotiations of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The trade deal was initially called the P2, and it was a two-way affair between New Zealand and Singapore. Chile and Brunei joined the negotiations, which were renamed the P4. Then the US joined, and the deal was re-branded as the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPP). Today, negotiating countries are splayed across the globe like a constellation only a highly trained astronomer could recognize. In addition to the first five, the TPP now includes Australia, Malaysia, Peru, and Vietnam. Canada and Mexico recently joined the talks and Japan is vying to participate in the negotiations

The next round of negotiations will take place in Lima, Peru, and proponents are pushing for a final agreement by fall.

But the language of TPP promoters rings hollow for those who have tracked the progress of other trade agreements, like NAFTA. “They’re saying that it’s going to open up opportunities for exporting more Mexican goods to other countries, like to Asia… That Mexico will become more competitive in other markets,” said Manuel Pérez-Rocha, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and member of the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC). Pérez-Rocha pointed out there’s little concrete evidence that Mexican exports to Asia will increase as an outcome of the agreement. “Mexico has actually signed many Free Trade Agreements with other countries, and its dependency to the US market hasn’t changed a bit,” he told the Americas Program.Since the US got on board, the TPP has taken shape as a second generation of geographically-distributed multilateral negotiations after the collapse of the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks and the Free Trade Area of the Americas proposal. According to the Office of the US Trade Representative, “This agreement will advance U.S. economic interests with some of the fastest-growing economies in the world; expand U.S. exports, which are critical to the creation and retention of jobs in the United States; and serve as a potential platform for economic integration across the Asia-Pacific region.” During the negotiations, concerns have been raised that the TPP will limit access to generic medications, impact Internet access, and affect local markets for textiles, shoes, milk, and grains in negotiating countries.

“[The TPP] is a way to isolate China, it’s a way to do an end run around the WTO and to kind of pursue the US agenda, which was not getting very far with countries that are willing to participate…  it’s just an expansion of the general free trade architecture that was being contested to some extent,” said Stuart Trew, trade campaigner with the Council of Canadians.

With the TPP, secrecy is the name of the game. So far, “there’s been no text released, the only text that’s come out is through leaks,” said Trew.

One of the key areas of concern is with the investment protection segment of the TPP, which was leaked in June 2012 to the US rights group Public Citizen. The TPP would bring in an augmented version of NAFTA’s controversial Chapter 11, an investment protection agreement by which companies can sue governments for imposing health and environmental legislation, among other things, applied across all countries involved. “The leaked text reveals a two-track legal system, with foreign firms empowered to skirt domestic courts and laws to directly sue TPP governments in foreign tribunals,” according to an analysis prepared by Public Citizen. “They can demand compensation for domestic financial, health, environmental, land use laws and other laws they claim undermine their new TPP privileges.”

The fact that the TPP is being negotiated between countries that have already signed various Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and multilateral trade agreements has shifted the nature of the concerns among activists in negotiating countries away from strictly market based concerns and towards issues of Intellectual Property (IP) and investment protection. Intellectual Property (IP) represents another area where the US is pursuing an aggressive agenda in TPP negotiations.

“While the TPP has some similarities with the free trade agreement that Chile signed with the United States in 2004, but from what has come out through leaks of the negotiating text, the TPP has intellectual property standards that are much higher than [the US-Chile FTA], which in the Chilean case could imply changes to laws which protect innovation and internet users,” according to Francisco Javier Vera Hott, project director of Derechos Digitales, an internet rights group based in Santiago de Chile. “Chile has commercial agreements with all parties of the TPP, so this agreement doesn’t represent any economic or employment gains or [changes to] market access, instead it represents losses as we are required to implement stricter norms with regards to intellectual property, without any retribution.”

IP is similarly a major concern in Peru and in Canada. “In the case of the TPP in Peru, for example, it’s not just another agreement with countries with which we already have [Free Trade Agreements], the threats go beyond commercial exchange strictly speaking… They’re more in the area of deepening institutional reforms in sensitive sectors like intellectual property,” Alejandra Alayza, executive coordinator of the Peruvian Network for Globalization with Equity (redGE Perú), told the Americas Program from her office in Lima.

“The US proposal [regarding intellectual property] has been on the table for more than a year and a half, and regardless of the fact that the other countries have rejected the proposal, the US is insisting on raising the standards and they haven’t pulled their proposal, at the same time, they’re seeking to wrap up negotiations in the next few months,” said Alayza. “This shows a clear intention to press for new intellectual property regulations on behalf of the pharmaceutical sector, which would strengthen the transnational monopoly of the pharmaceutical companies, weakening access to medicines and competition of internal markets and generic drugs.”

Pharmaceutical drugs and the IP chapter in the TPP could also have an impact on the availability of generic drugs of other negotiating countries, including Canada, according to Trew, who says drug prices in Canada will likely rise if the TPP is passed. “Proposed by U.S. negotiators, the IP rules enhance patent and data protections for pharmaceutical companies, dismantle public health safeguards enshrined in international law, and obstruct price-lowering generic competition for medicines,” reads a statement released last month by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

The stakes are a little different in Mexico, which has an economy that is much more dependent on the US than the other Latin American nations involved. If anything, the TPP will deepen Mexico’s dependence, according to IPS’s Pérez-Rocha.

Compared to Peru, for example, “Mexico is much more dependent on the United States, more dependent to NAFTA, in general Mexican producers are very concerned that the privileges Mexico has with the United States will be diluted, that Asian companies will be able to come and assemble in Mexico and export to the United States, affecting very strongly Mexican producers,” he said, noting that the Mexican textile and shoemaking sector have shown opposition to the pact.  “For example textiles, they could import from Vietnam, to name a country, and they wouldn’t pay tariffs on the imports, and then they could produce clothes to export to the United States from here in Mexico, so basically that’s one of the gravest concerns of the textile associations.”

In addition to the textile and shoemaking sectors, Pérez-Rocha pointed out that Mexico’s milk, coffee and basic grains sectors could all be negatively impacted through the passage of the TPP. Canada’s dairy sector could also take a hit if the TPP is passed.

“Really its just another race to the bottom, but no one wants to get left out, no one wants their economy to be somehow damaged if they’re not part of the negotiations,” said Trew.

Though Alayza said she isn’t expecting mass mobilizations in Peru during TPP negotiations there, events are being organized in Peru and elsewhere to coincide with the talks. The TPPxBorder group has started compiling a list of events being organized against the TPP, beginning with a day of action on May 11^th.

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist and independent researcher. See more of her work online at dawnpaley.ca.

Here’s a piece from my trip to Juárez and El Paso in March, published by Toward Freedom.

April 18, 2013

Saul Reyes Salazar is a man who understands loss.

In January 2010, his sister Josefina was shot in the head, following a botched kidnapping in their hometown of Guadalupe los Bravos, across the border bridge from Tornillo, Texas. She was, at the time, one of the best-known activists in the Juarez Valley, the agricultural region that follows the Rio Grande river east of Ciudad Juarez.

In the years before her death, Josefina became one of the strongest critics of the Mexican army’s role in policing the drug war. Five thousand soldiers entered Juarez and the Valley in May of 2008, bringing along with them a wave of murders and kidnappings. Miguel Ángel Reyes Salazar, Josefina’s son, was kidnapped by soldiers in August 2008, and released a month later. Following his kidnapping, Josefina didn’t back down. Not until she was killed, that is.

The Reyes Salazar family came together and declared that Josefina’s killing was not a coincidence. She was killed, they said, because of her political activities. Eyewitness testimony fed the family’s suspicion. Before he pulled the trigger, one of Josefina’s assassins said, “You think you are tough because you are with the organizations,” according to someone who saw the killing.

Seven months passed, and Saul’s brother Rubén was murdered in Guadalupe. His body was shot through with 19 rounds from an AK-47. According to Saul, Rubén had been the loudest voice calling into question the official story that Josefina’s killing was a random act of violence.

That year, the Reyes Salazar family celebrated Christmas and the New Year as best they could, in a haze of sadness and mourning. Then, in February 2011, tragedy struck again. Saul’s sister, Magdalena, and his brother, Elías, were kidnapped, together with Elías’s wife, Luisa Ornelas. All three were kidnapped from Guadalupe.

The remaining siblings set up a protest camp at the State District Attorney’s office in Juarez, demanding the safe return of their disappeared family members. They stayed for two weeks, during which time the house of their mother, Sara, was set on fire while she was out. Once the family moved their protest to Mexico City, the governor agreed to meet with Sara Reyes Salazar. Shortly thereafter, the bodies of Magdalena, Elías, and Luisa were found in shallow graves. All exhibited signs of torture.

The news devastated the family. Leaving behind their houses, cars, and possessions, Saul and his wife, together with their children, decided to leave Mexico for good.

I met Saul in an El Paso café on a windy weekday morning. We set up the appointment through his attorney’s office – even in the US, the Reyes Salazar family takes great precautions. I was familiar with his family’s story, and knew that around 30 of his relatives had sought amnesty in the US, which Saul, his wife and kids had been granted.Clearly, Saul Reyes Salazar knows about loss. In less than two years, four of his siblings and his sister-in-law were brutally murdered. He lost his home and his livelihood.

From time to time, Saul speaks to the media about his family’s plight. But there is so much more that goes unsaid.

Before the killings and kidnappings started, before former president Felipe Calderón launched a war on drugs with US backing, before 10,000 soldiers and police arrived in Ciudad Juarez, the Reyes Salazar family was known for other things.

They helped organize a massive campaign against a proposed nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas, a small town near the border that already received much of New York City’s human waste. Sierra Blanca, a small town known mostly for a migration police checkpoint that has landed numerous celebrities in jail on drug charges, is located 15 km from the US-Mexico Border. The drought-ridden desert region is economically depressed and most of the population is of Mexican descent. Resistance to the nuclear cemetery, as opponents dubbed it, began in Texas and quickly spread to northern Mexico.

“In Mexico, [our family] participated by trying to wake up peoples’ environmental consciousness, and building acts of resistance. Like closing the US-Mexico border for one hour during one day – we closed the whole border, all international bridges were closed for more than one hour, all of them. With participation from other groups, we did a walk called ‘The Walk for Life,’ from El Paso, Texas to Sierra Blanca, a bi-national walk. Americans walked on the American side, and Mexicans on the Mexican side,” reminisced Reyes-Salazar.

The March 21, 1992 border blockade protesting the nuclear waste dump was and remains the first time ever US-Mexico border crossing – from San Diego to Brownsville – was closed by activists. The bi-national organizing around Sierra Blanca led to the cancellation of the project and a promise that it would not be revived.

Sierra Blanca was just one of the struggles embraced by the Reyes Salazar family, whose success came from combining innovative organizing methods with their vast social network in the border area. They fought against the illegal disposal of contaminants, the pollution of water in Ciudad Juarez (located upstream from the Valley), and the use of outlawed chemicals by maquiladoras operating in Mexico.

Many of these struggles were precursors to what we now call environmental justice struggles. Community organizers, including members of the Reyes Salazar family, worked on combatting environmental racism, the exposing of poor people and people of color to dangerous toxins and hazards ignored by the general population.

“Today, there’s pretty much no one who talks about this, but the Juarez Valley is still contaminated by a 100 km canal that carries Juarez waste water, the farming lands are contaminated by chemicals by various maquilas who dump their chemicals in the waste, there’s oil from the mechanics shops, and of course all of the human waste from all of the houses in Ciudad Juarez end up in the Valley, which is basically the septic tank of Juarez,” said Saul.

Reyes Salazar estimates that in the state of Chihuahua alone, 40 activists have been killed since December 2006, something he likens to an ideological cleansing of environmental and human rights activists in the state.

Saul and his family are no longer active in environmental movements. Instead, they are scraping by in their new lives in Texas, forced to live with the devastating impacts of the drug war every day. Their family has also become an unfortunate example of the fate that can befall activists in Mexico-at-war.

“The violence, the situation we’re living, has made many organizations go dormant. It’s made us go on pause, no?” said Felix Leonardo Pérez Verdugo during an interview in Juarez in late 2011. Pérez Verdugo is a member of the Ecological Council of Ciudad Juarez. He also participated in the fight against Sierra Blanca. “Sure, some groups are working, but it’s not like before. I think there is a kind of fear, a fear of going out and participating,” he said.

Although homicide rates have fallen since we talked over a year ago, there is little proof that environmental organizing has re-emerged, despite ongoing ecological problems linked primarily to water and contamination.

The experience of returning to Juarez and crossing to El Paso to talk to Saul Reyes Salazar reminded me of the last time I had interviewed people who had lost multiple family members to state violence, in Rabinal, Guatemala. There, survivors of massacres that took place in the early 1980s continue to grieve and suffer the massive losses inflicted on their families during the internal conflict.

According to Guatemalan writers active at that time, the violence inflicted against the people of Rabinal and elsewhere prevented participation and organization on the community or group level.

According to a group of critical writers attempting to understand terror in Guatemala in the early 1980s, “With domination through terror, in addition to the physical elimination of those who oppose the interests of the regime, there is also the pursuit of ‘the control of a social universe made possible through the intimidation induced by acts of destruction… (and with) acts of terror, there is an overall impact on the social universe —at a social and generalized level— of a whole series of psychosociological pressures which impose an obstacle to possible political action.’”[1]

Thirty years have passed since then, but there is no doubt that the Reyes Salazar family has been terrorized, along with hundreds of thousands of others throughout northern Mexico – terrorized by the army and terrorized by criminal groups. And while the terror has failed to generate silence, it has certainly caused a slow-down of organizing along the US-Mexico border.

Before we get up from the table at the café, I asked Saul who it is he would fear, should he go back to Mexico. “The government, the drug trafficking cartels, because attacking the government means attacking their associates,” he said.

I then asked him if he ever thinks about moving back to Mexico, back to his hometown, which is so close to the border he can see it across the river from Texas.

“Going back to Mexico, for me, would probably be, with everything that I have said there, and here, the surest way for me to die,” he said.

Dawn Paley is an investigative journalist from Vancouver, BC. More of her work can be found on her website at dawnpaley.ca, or follow her on twitter @dawn_.

________________________________

[1] Gomis, R. Romillo, M., Rodríguez, I. “Reflexiones sobre la political del terror: El caso de Guatemala.” Cuadernos de Nuestra América. Vol 1. 1983. La Habana. Cited in: Equipo de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala.

Rarámuri delegation from Mexico arrives in Washington, Upside Down World, March 14, 2013

URIQUE, CHIHUAHUA – Cold air cuts through the meeting hall, drafting in through a gap between the corrugated roof and the adobe walls. Women sit on one side of the room in sandals or vintage Nike runners and long skirts, their heads covered by kerchiefs. On the other side sit the men, in slacks and shirts and vests. Children kick around a soccer ball outside, and from the kitchen wafts the smell of chili and beans.

This gathering, held in Bakajípare, deep in the highlands of Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountain range, was a strategy session for an upcoming meeting between members of Rarámuri (Tarahumara) communities and the state government of Chihuahua. The encroachment of tourism projects, the difficulty of accessing health services, problems in schools and with waste management dominated the discussion, which was sometimes in Spanish but mostly in Rarámuri.

Four representatives from Rarámuri communities have made the long trip from their remote communities to Washington, DC, to appear before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, where they will appear today at 5pm. This is the first hearing ever granted to the Rarámuri. It is expected the four representatives, who are backed by 41 Indigenous governors, will testify about logging, tourism, and other issues impacting their communities.

Over the past six years, the Sierra Madre has become one of the most dangerous regions in Mexico.

Vicious acts of violence against civilians erupt with stunning regularity. Thirteen people, including a baby, were massacred in September, 2008 in the nearby tourist town of Creel. Eighteen months later, another massacre – this one caught on video – among whose victims was a 14-year-old girl. Four teachers on their way to a funeral in the mountain town of Guachochi were pulled from their car, tortured and murdered after passing through a checkpoint believed to have been run by a criminal group. Repeated complaints to authorities about the checkpoint were ignored. This year started with a headline in La Jornada that screamed “Attacks and siege of populations leave 14 dead in Chihuahua.” In February, the Bishop of the Sierra Tarahumara said narcotraffickers control the mountain range.

“In 2007, there were probably at least 150,000 people from all over the world coming to this area, plus another maybe 100,000 Mexicans from all over Mexico coming to visit this region, and it was growing,” said Randall Gingrich, the executive director of Tierra Nativa, an organization that provides accompaniment, legal and technical support to highland communities. “By 2009 international tourism had dropped to maybe a couple hundred, and national tourism dropped almost as badly.”

Particularly hard hit has been the tourist economy linked to El Chepe, a passenger train that carries visitors from Chihuahua City to the Pacific coast, passing through a mountain range where the landscape is often compared to that of Arizona’s Grand Canyon. The train used to pass through communities like Divisadero four times a day, now it only passes once.

“These days there’s no sales at the train, we want two trains a day from Chihuahua and another two from Mochis,” said Miguel Cruz Moreno, a Rarámuri governor from Mogótavo, Chihuahua. Selling crafts and instruments to tourists has become a mainstay for Rarámuri men and women who live along the train’s route in otherwise isolated parts of the mountain range.

Community members are not the only ones banking on the economic opportunities linked to increased passenger train traffic through their villages. A number of tourism-oriented mega projects are in the works, whose proposals depend on a rebound in the number of travelers. But these proposals come at the expense of the Rarámuri communities nearby.

“Not having legal recognition for their original territorial rights is the root cause for a series of conflicts they face with different governmental institutions, authorities and private land owners, conflicts that have lasted for years and have gone unsolved to this very day,” reads a press release by Defensa Tarahumara, a network of organizations that has worked towards making today’s IACHR hearing a reality. “The lack of recognition of their ancestral rights also implies that they have been deprived of usage rights and preferential access to the natural resources found on their own lands, as exemplified by the state sponsored Copper Canyon Tourism Development Trust (Fideicomiso Barrancas del Cobre).”

Arriving in Divisadero today, visitors are confronted by a mini-golf course on the edge of a cliff overlooking a dramatic canyon, as well as an imposing, chain link fence separating the road from the scenic overlook at the cliff’s edge. These are the latest developments brought through a series of land deals linked to the Fideicomiso Barrancas del Cobre.

Opponents say these deals are illegal and damaging to the Rarámuri people.

“The investors don’t respect the people, they should ask the community and the authority… if the community doesn’t want it, it shouldn’t happen,” said Cruz Moreno. His community was never consulted before construction started. A lawsuit against the state-run Fideicomiso Barrancas del Cobre led to a Supreme Court ruling in March 2012 which obliged the organization to consult with local communities regarding major tourism projects and land sales. “The first thing to do is to ask the community,” emphasized Cruz Moreno, indicating that even since the ruling there has not been adequate communication between developers and Indigenous people.

The Fideicomiso started construction work in the Sierra in 1996, building all kinds of tourist infrastructure including ziplines and a new train station. Their proposed developments in Divisadero threaten to displace longtime artisans and vendors. Even though the Fideicomiso was ostensibly created to bring economic benefits to the Rarámuri people, “not one cent has gone towards improving the lives of the Rarámuri communities in the cliffs: they lack clean drinking water, all kinds of services, and medical attention,” according to local columnist Victor Quintana.

Four of the communities to testify before the IAHRC today lack recognition of their traditional lands. In legal terms defended by the State, they do not exist. They lack many basic services. Those far from tourism pressures are threatened by logging and land fraud, isolated but not defeated by the omnipresence of fear in the region. Today’s hearings in Washington open up a new space for the Rarámuri to air their concerns and seek meaningful consultation as they strive to protect their economies and their land from further enclosure and encroachment.

The proceedings will be broadcast live here. A recording of the proceedings will be made available later here.

Dawn Paley is a journalist and editor member with the Media Co-op. Her work is online at dawnpaley.ca and you can follow her on Twitter at dawn_.

Corn on the Border: NAFTA and Food in Mexico

Watershed Sentinel, March/April 2013

Ciudad de Guatemala— La noticia abrió su paso en Estados Unidos (EEUU) durante los lentos días de verano a finales de agosto: 200 infantes de marina estadounidenses arribaron a Guatemala como parte de la guerra contra las drogas.[1] El despliegue de tropas de combate estadounidenses en Guatemala fue parte de la Operación Martillo; un plan militar destinado a cortar/tajar las rutas de tráfico de cocaína que atraviesan Centroamérica en su camino desde Colombia hacia Estados Unidos.

Luchar contra la delincuencia organizada y el tráfico de drogas es la justificación más reciente de Estados Unidos para incursionar en Guatemala, lo cual justifica, además, el aumento de actividades de las Fuerzas Armadas guatemaltecas en el país. Esta militarización toma lugar en áreas donde existen conflictos sociales y de territorio debido a la imposición de mega proyectos de extracción de recursos, tales como industrias mineras y de petróleo. Además, las comunidades que resisten el desplazamiento y las industrias extractivas, han sido sofocadas con acusaciones de estar involucradas en el crimen organizado; en algunos casos, pueblos enteros de campesinos han sido etiquetados como “narco-comunidades”.

“Sentimos que es un pretexto –la lucha contra el narco- para volver al despliegue militar que se mantuvo durante la etapa más fuerte del conflicto armado y que derivó en actos de genocidio”, dijo Iduvina Hernández Batres, directora de la Asociación para el Estudio y Promoción de la Seguridad en Democracia (Sedem). El ejército guatemalteco, el cual no es elegible formalmente para recibir asistencia militar de Estados Unidos, fue responsable de la gran mayoría de muertos y desaparecidos: 200,000 y 50,000, respectivamente, durante  el conflicto armado interno que finalizó oficialmente en 1996.

Las fuerzas armadas guatemaltecas fueron llamadas para “poner fin a las amenazas externas y contribuir a la neutralización de grupos armados ilegales mediante la fuerza militar”, por el presidente guatemalteco Otto Pérez Molina un mes después de su inauguración en enero de 2012.[2] Pérez Molina, ex General y jefe de la inteligencia militar, también prometió aumentar el gasto militar. Hasta ahora, ha mantenido su promesa. De acuerdo con Plaza Pública, una plataforma digital de periodismo a profundidad de Guatemala,  el presupuesto para equipo militar y de seguridad, sólo en 2013 sobrepasará todo el gasto entre 2004 y 2012. [3]El arribo de la marina estadounidense en Guatemala representa más que una maniobra militar para interrumpir/atajar el tráfico de drogas. Ello demuestra que Estados Unidos puede encarar una invasión militar bajo el discurso de la guerra contra las drogas sin que cause revuelo o crítica alguna en sus países aliados, como Guatemala. El despliegue de las tropas estadounidenses en ese país es, de manera argumentada, el más claro ejemplo de una estrategia evolucionada en la que el establecimiento del ejército norteamericano apuesta para expandir y controlar en el hemisferio, todo dentro de un marco internacional de democracia formal, de la ley y el orden.

“Los desafíos de seguridad predominantes en el hemisferio ya no derivan principalmente del conflicto de estado a estado,  paramilitares de derecha, o insurgentes de izquierda,” se lee en la Declaración de Política de Defensa del Hemisferio Occidental de EEUU, publicada en octubre de 2012. “Hoy, las amenazas a la estabilidad y la paz regional derivan de la propagación de narcóticos y otras formas de tráfico ilícito, pandillas, y terrorismo, cuyos efectos pueden ser exacerbados por desastres naturales y oportunidades económicas desiguales.”[4]

Guatemala, y Centroamérica como un todo, es campo de prueba para una iteración de la nueva estrategia de control de las Fuerzas Armadas estadounidenses, la cual ha sido aplicada de manera desigual a lo largo del hemisferio. Aquí se incluye la presencia de tropas de combate de EEUU –algo que no se ha visto en México. También incluye la intervención de militares de Canadá, Chile y Colombia, como entrenadores en materia de seguridad de la región.[5]

Los acontecimientos en Guatemala suceden en el contexto de una guerra contra las drogas en México, respaldada por EEUU, en aumento constante, que ha empujado el número de homicidios a alrededor de 100,000 en los pasados seis años; de acuerdo con algunas estimaciones.[6]

Mientras México ha sido un foco central para fondos anti-narcóticos y atención mediática por parte de Estados Unidos, en cambio, los vecinos al sur recibido la parte de acción. El despliegue la marina estadounidense en Guatemala llegó justo dos meses después de una controvertida masacre de civiles en Ahuas, Honduras; cuando EEUU respaldó los esfuerzos antidrogas allí, salió mal. De acuerdo con grupos de derechos humanos, agentes de la Administración de la Lucha Antidrogas (DEA, por sus siglas en inglés) y de la policía hondureña dispararon desde helicópteros del Departamento de Estado y mataron a cuatro indígenas en el noroeste del país en mayo.[7]

“Las aeronaves usadas en esa operación fueron en ese momento piloteadas por oficiales del ejército de Guatemala”, dijo Hernández. “Posteriormente aparece –la Operación Martillo- públicamente en Guatemala, arrancando oficialmente a mediados de este año, pero la fecha de inicio de las operaciones es anterior”.

Según fuentes oficiales, entre julio y octubre, miembros de los Cuerpos de Fuerza de la Marina de Estados Unidos, Sur –el componente naval del Comando Sur de EEUU-, volaron helicópteros destinados a esfuerzos para obstruir el tráfico en Guatemala, fuera de Santa Elena, Petén; y aeronaves fuera de La Aurora en la ciudad de Guatemala, Retalhuleu, y Puerto San José. Asimismo, aquellos se coordinaron con la Marina guatemalteca en Puerto Quetzal, en la costa del Pacífico.[8]

Más allá de un puñado de historias, las noticias del despliegue de tropas en servicio activo de combate en Guatemala, lograron apenas un punto en los medios.[9] Además de que se vio desapercibido en la nación Centroamericana. Pocos fuera de los círculos de investigación militar y de seguridad, eran conscientes de los detalles del acuerdo entre la embajada estadounidense y el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores Guatemala.

Nineth Montenegro, la segunda vice presidenta del Congreso de Guatemala, le dijo a Toward Freedom que se enteró de las operaciones a través de reportes en el periódico.

“Al congreso nunca ha llegado tal discusión, fue un acuerdo gubernamental que el presidente aprobó,” afirmó Montenegro. “Algunos aquí piensan que hubo alguna violación, porque el poder legislativo es independiente y es el único que autoriza el paso de tropas o elementos militares o apoyo, pero nunca pasó.”

Un  Acuerdo en Silencio

En lugar de conducirse por canales constitucionales, el 16 de julio, 2012, la embajada de EEUU en Guatemala envió una nota verbal al Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, donde proponía las condiciones para la regularización de personal de defensa estadounidense en Guatemala. La nota de la embajada, que después fue transcrita y publicada en la Gaceta del Congreso guatemalteco, refiere a acuerdos de cooperación militar y aérea firmados entre ambos países en 1949, 1954 y 1955.[10] Uno de los documentos referidos en el acuerdo fue firmado por Castillo Armas, un dictador militar que tomó el poder después de que Estados Unidos respaldara un golpe contra el presidente Jacobo Arbenz en 1954. Tales referencias dejan en claro que los elementos legales que permiten el actual compromiso de las Fuerzas Armadas estadounidenses en Guatemala fueron creados a raíz del golpe en 1954, y se ha mantenido desde entonces.

Un día después de que recibieron la propuesta de la embajada, el gobierno de Guatemala respondió afirmativamente. Toward Freedom obtuvo el intercambio de notas entre Estados Unidos y Guatemala, la cual legaliza la presencia de tropas de EEUU y contratistas de seguridad privada empleados por el Departamento de Defensa estadounidense en Guatemala por 120 días, desde el 17 de julio. ^[11]

El acuerdo permite al personal estadounidense importar y exportar bienes sin inspección o impuestos de parte del gobierno guatemalteco; a transitar libremente hacia dentro, fuera y a lo largo del país sin interferencia del gobierno; y hacer uso libre e ilimitado de las radiofrecuencias.[12] Los soldados y contratistas de EEUU se les concede inmunidad judicial en Guatemala por lesiones o muertes de civiles o personal militar que resulte de la operación.

De acuerdo con miembros de la Marina estadounidense, su misión en Guatemala, dirigida por la Fuerza de Tarea Conjunta Inter-agencia del Sur (JIATFS, por sus siglas en inglés) de Key West, Florida, representa un giro de 180 grados a lo que la organización ha hecho tradicionalmente.

“Por décadas, los Cuerpos de la Marina han apoyado el compromiso en Centro y Suramérica con la pretensión de construir la capacidad de asociación y mejorar interoperabilidad,” escribió el capitán Greg Wolf en el sitio web oficial del Cuerpo de la Marina. “En días recientes, sin embargo, las guerras en Irak y Afganistán han reducido un poco de ese compromiso. Los infantes de Marina del Destacamento Martillo, gozaron de la oportunidad de colaborar con las autoridades guatemaltecas y fortalecer vínculos en la región.”[13]

Según el profesor de historia de la Universidad de Nueva York Greg Grandin, cuyo libro Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Empire documenta el traslado de Vietnam y el sur de Asia a Centroamérica a finales de 1970; el discurso de las Fuerzas Armadas de EEUU disfraza un intento continuo de controlar ejércitos y policía locales.

“Hemos hecho un largo camino desde el robusto lenguaje de la Guerra Fría –la cual aclamó escuadrones de la muerte latinoamericanos  y dictadores como ‘luchadores por la libertad’ en la línea frontal de una cruzada anticomunista global- al balbuceo pueril de ‘construir la capacidad de asociación y mejorar interoperabilidad’”, apunta Grandin en un correo para Toward Freedom. “Pero, básicamente, el objetivo ha permanecido igual al coordinar las fuerzas de seguridad nacional en el trabajo a nivel internacional que se subordina, directa o indirectamente, a la dirección en Washington”.

Dicho esto, Grandin piensa que el alcance de Estados Unidos en el hemisferio ha disminuido, por tanto, la importancia de lo que sucede en países como Honduras y Guatemala es aún mayor.

“La diferencia es que el nivel alcanzado por EEUU se ha reducido de Latinoamérica en general a, básicamente, un pasillo que corre desde Colombia, a través de Centroamérica, hasta México”, señala Grandin. “Pero aún allí, la hegemonía estadounidense es amenazada por un grado de independencia impensada apenas hace unos años, sea en la Colombia de Juan Manuel Santos o en Nicaragua de Daniel Ortega”.

La inquebrantable lealtad demostrada por el gobierno de Guatemala hacia Washington, así como la presencia de tropas estadounidenses, -tanto evidente como clandestina- tiene un precedente histórico muy fuerte.

En 1960, la Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA, por sus siglas en inglés) se coordinó directamente con el derechista José Miguel Ramón Ydígoras Fuentes, quien ofreció apoyo en la invasión a Girón contra Fidel Castro en Cuba. De acuerdo con documentos desclasificados de la CIA, “Guatemala, no sólo rompió relaciones oficiales con Cuba, sino que a finales de Febrero, 1960, el presidente Ydígoras ofreció el uso de su territorio para apoyar actividades propagandísticas dirigidas contra Castro; y también hizo una oferta especial mediante la CIA ‘a grupos favorecidos por nosotros con facilidades para entrenamiento en el área de Petén, Guatemala.’”[14]

Estados Unidos continuó involucrado abiertamente en cualquier tipo de operación militar en Guatemala a lo largo de 1978, aun cuando el apoyo militar oficial para dicho país fue suspendido por el Congreso estadounidense después de que la evidencia de masacres, violaciones y desapariciones por parte de las fuerzas armadas resultó infranqueable.

Los asesinatos extrajudiciales, entre otros escándalos, aún acosan al ejército de Guatemala. En octubre pasado, 2012, seis personas fueron asesinadas cuando soldados dispararon a manifestantes indígenas que protestaban por los altos costos de electricidad, cambios al programa de formación docente y por reformas constitucionales, en Totonicapán.[15]

La asistencia de EEUU a las Fuerzas de Guatemala ha sido mediante el apoyo a iniciativas anti-narcóticos, incluyendo la Iniciativa de Seguridad Regional de Centroamérica (CARSI, por sus siglas en inglés), un programa de casi $500 millones de dólares que dio inicio en 2008, con refuerzo, equipo y entrenamiento dirigido a policías y militares centroamericanos.

La presencia de tropas estadounidenses en Guatemala dentro de misiones que no son de combate sigue en curso, consiste en despliegues militares uno tras otro. Más allá del horizonte, Beyond the Horizon, una serie de “prácticas de interacción humanitaria en conjunto con militares extranjeros patrocinado por el Comando Sur estadounidense” en Honduras y Guatemala, terminó dos días antes de que la Marina aterrizara en Guatemala para la Operación Martillo en julio.[16] Dos días después de que los soldados de la Operación Martillo dejaran Guatemala, miembros de batallones de construcción de la Marina de Estados Unidos, se desplegaron en Coban, Alta Verapaz, como parte de una “misión cooperativa de seguridad” con tropas locales.[17]

Pero hay un nuevo giro en el combate de marinos norteamericanos en Guatemala para la Operación Martillo. “Ese es el primer despliegue naval que apoya directamente la lucha transnacional anticrimen en esa área, y ciertamente la huella más grande que hemos tenido allí en bastante tiempo”, indicó a AP el sargento de personal de la Marina Earnest Barnes, poco después de que las noticias sobre el despliegue irrumpieran en Estados Unidos.[18]

O bien, como lo menciona la revista Wired , era como “Marinos contra Zetas”, al referirse al grupo narco-paramilitar mexicano conocido por secuestros masivos, extorsiones y masacres de civiles en México y Guatemala.[19]

Aliados Improbables en un Mundo Incierto

En un discurso en Virginia, en octubre de 2012, el Secretario de Defensa de EEUU, Leon Panetta, esbozó el plan de su ejército de cara a las restricciones presupuestarias; explicó que los despliegues rotativos y las prácticas conjuntas con militares locales se constituirían como un elemento muy importante de la estrategia de defensa del país.

“Nosotros construimos alianzas, asociaciones, erigimos su capacidad y competencia para que puedan defender y proveer su propia seguridad”, afirmó Panetta. “Entonces, eso haremos. Haremos eso en América Latina. Lo haremos en África. En Europa. Lo haremos en el Pacífico. Sólo con tener un despliegue rotativo de marinos dentro de Darwin. Vamos a desarrollar la misma competencia en Filipinas. Haremos lo mismo en Vietnam. Y lo mismo en cualquier otra parte”.[20]

El Comando Sur de EEUU, que opera desde nuevas sedes de $400 millones de dólares  al poniente de Miami, es responsable de todas las actividades en Centro y Latinoamérica.[21]

“El papel del ejército no es actuar como fuerza para la aplicación de la ley, sin embargo, la realidad es que se le ha llamado para lidiar con ese problema de manera provisional en varios países, desafortunadamente”, explicó Frank Mora, Subsecretario adjunto de Defensa para Asuntos del Hemisferio Occidental, en junio. “Cuando se le pide hacer un trabajo que muchos no quieren hacer –como lo es lograr la aplicación de la ley, como en El Salvador y Guatemala- ellos han hecho lo mejor que pueden”.[22]

Una de las complicaciones menos reconocidas por el aumento de la colaboración norteamericana con las Fuerzas guatemaltecas es el papel que ha tenido el ejército y que aún tiene en el tráfico de drogas. Se ha documentado que el ejército de Guatemala ha estado involucrado en tráfico de drogas, pero ello no ha detenido a Estados Unidos de asociarse con él o de proveerlo con tecnología y entrenamiento dirigido al control del flujo de narcóticos.

“La evidencia de diversas fuentes, que incluye información de reportes de la DEA, indica que desde los 80 traficantes colombianos lograron acceso a las redes de tráfico junto con rutas clave a lo largo del sur y poniente de Guatemala”, se lee en una investigación disponible al público, del Centro de Análisis y Soluciones Navales (CNA Analysis and Solutions), el cual está relacionado con la marina. “Esas redes se componen de oficiales de inteligencia militar, sus subordinados y antiguos colegas, informantes y asociados –incluso, comisionados militares”.[23]

A mediados de los 90s, el mayor capo de la droga era Byron Berganza, un ex militar cuya “seguridad a detalle estaba compuesta exclusivamente de oficiales militares”, según un informe en 2010 del Instituto Woodrow Wilson.[24] En ese tiempo, Berganza era informante de la DEA y el intermediario guatemalteco con grupos traficantes de droga en Colombia. Berganza  fue extraditado a Estados Unidos en 2003, lo cual deja un vacío de poder en el mercado para el transbordo de drogas del país; eventualmente, aquel se llenó de miembros de un puñado de familias poderosas de Guatemala.

Desde que el presidente mexicano Felipe Calderón lanzó la guerra para combatir el tráfico de drogas allí, en diciembre de 2006, los traficantes de droga mexicanos cada vez más han replanteado su territorio en Guatemala.

“Esto tiene mucho que ver con el inicio de la guerra en México y los intereses del control de territorio en torno a actores que no se entrometían en ello porque ese era el trabajo de narcotraficantes locales”, afirma Claudia Virginia Samayoa, quien coordina UDEFEGUA, un grupo dedicado a defender activistas en Guatemala.

En estos días, de acuerdo con la activista y escritora Jennifer Harbury, la escalada de violencia en Guatemala “ha sido acarreada por líderes militares que se quitaron el uniforme después de la guerra, que crearon grandes mafias para circular drogas, que contrataron y entrenaron pandillas como los Zetas –eso está muy bien documentado- que los ayudarán a traficar la droga”.[25]

Era un antiguo Kaibil (miembro de Fuerzas Especiales de élite en Guatemala) quien fue acusado de dirigir el más particular acto de violencia en Guatemala ligado al tráfico de drogas. Hugo Gómez Vásquez fue acusado de supervisar la masacre en la Finca Los Cocos, Petén, en mayo de 2011, donde 27 granjeros fueron asesinados, supuestamente parte de una disputa de tierra entre Otto Salguero, un terrateniente, y los Zetas.[26]

Algunos Kaibiles fueron entrenados en EEUU, como muchos de los primeros miembros de los Zetas, quienes desertaron de las GAFEs, una unidad aerotransportada de las Fuerzas Especiales de élite en México, a finales de los 90s. Los Kaibiles también han entrenado las GAFEs, y se han involucrado en el entrenamiento con infantes de marina estadounidenses.[27]

“Se ha vuelto normal que cuando se encuentra a un oficial en servicio activo entre los Zetas, o un Kaibil, dos o tres días pasan y el ejército alega ‘es que han desertado’, pero el proceso interno respecto de qué disciplina se les aplica y cuáles son los procedimientos, no son documentados”, cuenta Hernández a Toward Freedom.

A pesar de la evidente colaboración con los Zetas y otros grupos que trafican drogas, así como una historia de su participación en masacres, los Kaibiles guatemaltecos mantienen una relación privilegiada con las Fuerzas Armadas estadounidenses.

Capitalismo narco, de Guatemala al Caribe

“Estos señores, los Marines, no sólo vienen como te digo a controlar el narcotráfico, sino a instruir militarmente al ejército guatemalteco para lo que yo le llamo la continuación de la guerra fría”, indicó Kajkok Maximo Ba Tiul, un analista y profesor de la universidad Maya Poqomchi’ con base en Cobán, Alta Verapaz. “Una guerra fría más refinada, más academizada, más intelectualizada, si quieres. Pero que va a ser igual de salvaje y va a ser dañino para todos aquí en Guatemala, y que no creo, te lo digo sinceramente, no creo que sea sólo para Guatemala”.

El posicionamiento de nuevas bases militares en áreas de alto conflicto social, ha alarmado a los activistas locales. Una de las nuevas bases está en San Juan Sacatepequez, donde hay una gran lucha contra un proyecto de carretera y una cementera; otra en Panzós, cerca de donde se propone una mina de níquel en El Estor y zonas aledañas, las cuales están impregnadas en el conflicto de tierra relacionado con la producción industrial de African Palm; y la tercera en Petén, una amplia región del norte del país que actualmente atraviesa una ola de inversión y desarrollo petrolero.[28]

“En menos de diez meses, este gobierno ha inaugurado tres nuevas bases militares, y se ha hablado de una cuarta que estará lista y en funcionamiento para finales del año -2012- o a principios del siguiente, todo bajo el argumento –y eso es lo que nos preocupa- de una supuesta lucha contra el tráfico de drogas; ese ha sido el pretexto para la participación de las Fuerzas Armadas en la aplicación de la ley civil”, continuó Hernández, quien procedió a apuntar que cada una de las nuevas bases está localizada en áreas ricas en recursos.

En efecto, si la Guerra contra las Drogas en México y Guatemala continúa como ha sido en Colombia, la noción de lo que significa “éxito” en esta Guerra debe expandirse para incluir que se provean de nuevas oportunidades y garantías a inversores y corporaciones transnacionales, cuyas operaciones pueden también eventualmente beneficiarse del aumento de fuerzas policiacas militarizadas y un sistema reforzado de prisión, capaz de controlar disenso dentro de un marco de ley y orden “democrático”.[29]

Queda claro que el respaldo de Estados Unidos a la Guerra en México es lo que transformó el narco-panorama de Guatemala. Asimismo, hay poca duda de que empujar a los traficantes fuera de las aguas de la costa del Pacífico, como la Operación Martillo pretende, hará del mar Caribe una ruta más transitada.

Se sabe ampliamente que los consumidores de primer mundo alimentan el comercio de drogas. La oficina de Naciones Unidas sobre Drogas y Crimen informó en 2010 que  el 85 por ciento de las utilidades brutas de los $35 mil millones del mercado de cocaína se genera en EEUU. [30] Aunque también es importante considerar la habilidad de las Fuerzas Armadas de aquel país para manipular un enemigo, ahora llamado crimen organizado transnacional, creado por esa misma demanda. Estados Unidos y otros países tienen intereses estratégicos en el Caribe que podrían servirse de la aplicación de la guerra contra las drogas ahí.

De hecho, en octubre pasado, justo dos días después de que la Marina se fuera de Guatemala, el zar estadounidense de la Guerra contra las Drogas William Brownfield arribó en Santo Domingo, la capital de República Dominicana. “Todos nosotros,” declaró Brownfield, “estamos de acuerdo en que los meses y años por venir, el problema, la amenaza y el peligro de las drogas ilícitas incrementará, pero la culpa no es de la República Dominicana o su gente.”[31]

En contexto, se lee casi como una triste repetición del pasado. Justo cuando Guatemala fungió como suelo para la puesta en escena de la fallida invasión en Girón, 1960, otra vez ha servido potencialmente como base para facilitar la transferencia de la Guerra contra las Drogas de regreso al Caribe. Si tan sólo, como antes, la invasión fallara.

Dawn Paley. Texto original en inglés:

http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/3073-strategies-of-a-new-cold-war-us-marines-and-the-drug-war-in-guatemala

Notas:

*Fuente fotográfica: US Southcom

[1] Ruiz-Goireina, Romina, Mendoza, Martha. “200 US MARINES JOIN ANTI-DRUG EFFORT IN GUATEMALA.” 29 de Agosto, 2012. Revisado 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/200-us-marines-join-anti-drug-effort-guatemala

[2] CNN Wire Staff. “Guatemala’s president calls on troops to ‘neutralize’ organized crime.” 16 de enero, 2012. Revisado el 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://articles.cnn.com/2012-01-16/americas/world_americas_guatemala-military_1_alta-verapaz-peten-civil-war?_s=PM:AMERICAS

[3] Baires Quezada, Rodrigo. “Presupuesto: más represión que investigación y justicia.” Plaza Pública. 7 de noviembre, 2012. Revisado el 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.plazapublica.com.gt/content/presupuesto-mas-represion-que-investigacion-y-justicia

[4] Department of Defense. “Western Hemisphere Defense Policy Statement.” October 2012. P. 6. Revisado el 24 noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.defense.gov/news/WHDPS-English.pdf

[5] Department of Defense. “Western Hemisphere Defense Policy Statement.” October 2012. P. 8. Revisado noviembre 24, 2012, en: http://www.defense.gov/news/WHDPS-English.pdf

[6] Steller, Tim. “Years of killing hard to add up in Mexico.” Arizona Daily Star. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://azstarnet.com/news/local/years-of-killing-hard-to-add-up-in-mexico/article_482c219b-0587-5629-9e50-22fb244dacd8.html

[7] Bird, Annie; Main, Alex. “Collateral Damage in the Drug War: The May 11 killings in Ahuas and the impact of the U.S. war on drugs in La Moskitia, Honduras.” Agosto, 2012. Pp. 20. Revisado el 11 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/honduras-2012-08.pdf

[8] Hernández, Carlos. “Estados Unidos concluye “Operación Martillo” en el país.” Diario de Centro América. October 23, 2012. Revisado el 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.dca.gob.gt/index.php/template-features/item/5940-estados-unidos-concluye-%E2%80%9Coperaci%C3%B3n-martillo%E2%80%9D-en-el-pa%C3%ADs.html

Más información sobre el establecimiento de los infantes de marina estadounidense durante la Operación Martillo se basa en la evidencia visual presentada por el Comando Sur y la embajada de Estados Unidos en Guatemala. Debe notarse que la imagen de Santa Elena está mal etiquetada en la fecha. RETALHULEU: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ussouthcom/7979820592/in/photostream/

Lo mismo sucede aquí: http://www.2ndmaw.marines.mil/Photos.aspx?mgqs=2207160

Puerto Quetzal: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ussouthcom/7979821816/in/photostream

Ciudad de Guatemala: http://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassyguatemala/sets/72157631809378179/

[9] El silencio de los medios en torno al despliegue de las tropas de combate en Guatemala es ensordecedor. Por ejemplo, un artículo del LA Times que pretende revisar la participación de EEUU en actividades anti-narcóticos en Centroamérica, lo deja de lado por completo. Ver: Wilkinson, T., Fausset, R. “U.S. gingerly expands security role in Central America.” LA Times, 4 de diciembre, 2012. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-us-central-america-20121205,0,7198665,full.story

[10] Los acuerdos originales de 1949, 1954 y 1955 están disponibles en:https://s3.amazonaws.com/TowardsFreedom/1949+agreement.pdf

https://s3.amazonaws.com/TowardsFreedom/1954+agreement.pdf

https://s3.amazonaws.com/TowardsFreedom/1955+Agreement.pdf

[11] Organismo Ejecutivo. “Acuerdo por Canje de Notas entre el Gobierno de la Republica de Guatemala y el Gobierno de Estados Unidos de America Relativo a la Operacion Martillo.” Diario de Centro América. No 18 Tomo CCXCV. 20 de agosto, 2012. Revisado el 10 de noviembre, 2012, en:https://s3.amazonaws.com/TowardsFreedom/Canje+De+Notas+Martillo+2012.pdf.

[12] Organismo Ejecutivo. “Acuerdo por Canje de Notas entre el Gobierno de la Republica de Guatemala y el Gobierno de Estados Unidos de America Relativo a la Operacion Martillo.” Diario de Centro América. No 18 Tomo CCXCV. 20 de agosto, 2012. Revisado el10 de noviembre, 2012 en:https://s3.amazonaws.com/TowardsFreedom/Canje+De+Notas+Martillo+2012.pdf. Cabe recordar que en febrero de 2011, un avión de carga de la Fuerza Aérea estadounidense que llegaba a Argentina para prácticas conjuntas con la policía, fue descubierto con armas y morfina no declaradas por los soldados. CNN Wire Staff. “Cargo sparks dispute between Argentina, U.S.” 16 de febrero, 2011. Revisado el 24 de noviembre, 2012, en:http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/02/15/argentina.us.spat/index.html El acuerdo para el arribo de los marinos norteamericanos en Guatemala previene que agentes guatemaltecos revisen el contenido de aeronaves u otros vehículos que llegan al país.

[13] Wolf, Greg. “After partnering to disrupt trafficking, Detachment Martillo departs Guatemala.” 16 de octubre, 2012. Revisado el 13 de noviembre, 2012, en:http://www.hqmc.marines.mil/News/NewsArticleDisplay/tabid/3488/Article/128618/after-partnering-to-disrupt-trafficking-detachment-martillo-departs-guatemala.aspx

[14] Agencia Central de Inteligencia (CIA). “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation: Participation in the Conduct of Foreign Policy” Volume II. Octubre, 1979. Pp. 13-14. Revisado el 9 de noviembre, 2012, en:http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB353/bop-vol2-part1.pdf

[15] Paley, Dawn; Watts, Jonathan. “UK owner of Guatemalan energy firm urged to act after protest deaths.” October 12, 2012. The Guardian. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/12/uk-guatemalan-energy-firm-protest

[16] Comando Sur de Estados Unidos. “Beyond the Horizon, New Horizons 2012.” June 19, 2012. Revisado el 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.southcom.mil/newsroom/Pages/Beyond-the-Horizon–New-Horizons-2012.aspx

[17] Comando Sur. “Seabees,-Preventive-Medicine-Specialists-Team-Up-in-Guatemala.” 23 de octubre, 2012. Revisado el 12 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.arsouth.army.mil/news/southcomnews/4072-seabees-preventive-medicine-specialists-team-up-in-guatemala.html

[18] Ruiz-Goireina, Romina, Mendoza, Martha. “200 US MARINES JOIN ANTI-DRUG EFFORT IN GUATEMALA.” 29 de agosto, 2012. Revisado el 21 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/200-us-marines-join-anti-drug-effort-guatemala

[19] Beckhusen, Robert. “Marines vs. Zetas: U.S. Hunts Drug Cartels in Guatemala.” Wired. 29 de agosto, 2012. Revisado el 9 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/marinesvszetas/

[20] Panetta, L. “Speech: Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce.” October 19, 2012. Revisado el 24 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1729

[21] El Comando Norte de Estados Unidos, o NORTHCOM, es responsable de México, así como de las Islas Vírgenes, Puerto Rico, las Bahamas, Canadá y EEUU.

[22] Centro de Estudios para la Defensa del Hemisferio (CHDS, por sus siglas en inglés). “12 Questions for Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs Frank Mora.” Enero, 2012. Revisado el 24 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.ndu.edu/chds/news.cfm?action=view&id=57&lang=PT

[23] Espach, Ralph, et al. “Criminal Organizations and Illicit Trafficking in Guatemala’s Border Communities.” Diciembre, 2011. CNA Analysis and Solutions. Revisado el 22 de noviembre, 2012, en:http://www.cna.org/sites/default/files/research/IPR%2015225.pdf

[24] López, Julie. “GUATEMALA’S CROSSROADS: THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF VIOLENCE AND SECOND CHANCES.” In ORGANIZED CRIME IN CENTRAL AMERICA: THE NORTHERN TRIANGLE Edited by Cynthia J. Arnson and Eric L. Olson. Pp. 151. Revisado el 22 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/LAP_single_page.pdf

[25] Democracy Now! “Genocide-Linked General Otto Pérez Molina Poised to Become Guatemala’s Next President.” 15 de septiembre, 2011. Revisado el 22 de noviembre, 2012, en:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/15/genocide_linked_general_otto_prez_molina

En marzo de 2011, Harbury presentó una demanda en Guatemala en contra del presidente Pérez Molina, donde se alega sobre el papel de éste en la desaparición, tortura y asesinato de su esposo, el comandante guerrillero Efrain Bamaca. Ver: Orantes, Corelia. “Jennifer Harbury acciona contra Pérez Molina.”Prensa Libre. 23 de marzo, 2011. Revisado el 22 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://prensalibre.com.gt/noticias/Acciona-Perez_0_449355088.html

[26] Siglo21. “Fiscal dice que ex kaibil capturado dirigió masacre.” 19 de mayo, 2011. Revisado el 22 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.s21.com.gt/node/39187

[27] Gibler, John. To Die in Mexico. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012. Pp. 59.

Negrete, D. “Marines Sweat It Out With Guatemalan Kaibiles.” US Marines. 18 de septiembre, 2010. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://www.2ndmaw.marines.mil/News/ArticleView/tabid/357/Article/32610/marines-sweat-it-out-with-guatemalan-kaibiles.aspx

Padgett, Tim. “Guatemala’s Kaibiles: A Notorious Commando Unit Wrapped Up in Central America’s Drug War.” 14 de julio, 2011.Time Magazine. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://world.time.com/2011/07/14/guatemalas-kaibil-terror-from-dictators-to-drug-cartels/#ixzz2EguGbDZW

[28] Paley, Dawn. “Conflict, Repression, and Canadian Mining & Oil Companies in Guatemala”. 14 de mayo, 2012. Revisado el 12 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://dawnpaley.tumblr.com/post/23043137951/conflict-repression-and-canadian-mining-oil

Paley, Dawn. “The Spoils of an Undeclared War.” 1º de agosto, 2012. Briarpatch Magazine. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en: http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-spoils-of-an-undeclared-war

[29] Paley, Dawn. “Drug War Capitalism.” Against the Current. August 1, 2012. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, de: http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/3652

[30] UNODC. “World Drug Report, 2010.” United Nations, 2010. Pp. 18. Revisado el 10 de diciembre, 2012, en:http://www.unodc.org/documents/wdr/WDR_2010/World_Drug_Report_2010_lo-res.pdf

[31] Dominican Today. “U.S. pledges long term help for Dominican Republic‘s war on drug trafficking.” 16 de octubre, 2012. Revisado el 23 de noviembre, 2012, en: http://www.dominicantoday.com/dr/local/2012/10/16/45449/US-pledges-long-term-help-for-Dominican-Republics-war-on-drug

 Por Dawn Paley

La autora es periodista y editora con la Media Co-op. Mas informacion sobre su trabajo aqui: http://dawnpaley.ca/.Consulta la versión original en inglés aquí:http://www.towardfreedom.com/home/americas/3073-strategies-of-a-new-cold-war-us-marines-and-the-drug-war-in-guatemala

Traducción de Xilonen Pérez

A transcript of the documentary is available after the jump, just click the “more” button to the right.

Transcript of ”Communities in the Crosshairs: The Drug War in Guatemala”

This is Free Speech Radio News for Tuesday, December 25^th, 2012. In Los Angles, I’m Dorian Merina. Today we bring you a special documentary from Guatemala. Please stay with us.

Last summer, 200 US marines arrived in Guatemala to disrupt the operations drug traffickers on the pacific coast. President Otto Perez Molina, inaugurated in 2012, is a retired general who rose to become head of intelligence of the Guatemalan Army. He’s talked about de-criminalizing drugs at international forums, and embraced the militarization of drug trafficking domestically. During his term, Perez Molina promised improve security by cracking down on crime, and to promote development through energy projects and the extractive industries. But there’s a hitch: Throughout the country, communities are rising up and saying no to mining, dams, and mega projects. Across the country, these struggles are increasingly militarized. 

In this special documentary for FSRN, journalist Dawn Paley reports on resources, militarization, and the war on drugs in Guatemala.

COMMUNITIES IN THE CROSSHAIRS: THE DRUG WAR IN GUATEMALA

Downtown Cobán, Altaverapaz. Ice cream vendors take advantage of the warm temperatures to make a sale. Young couples wander hand in hand. A light breeze rustles the leaves of tall trees in the central park. You’d never know this is a city at the centre of the US backed war on drugs.

CHANNEL 4 NEWS: “It’s a violence that is spreading beyond mexico’s borders as the drugs cartels track their contraband through neighbouring Guatemala en route to the United States.”

AL JAZEERA: “This remote mountainous area near Guatemala’s poorest border with Mexico, has provided a perfect base for the zetas trafficking gang.”

Today, Cobán is relatively calm. International troops and police train at a military base on the edge of town. Soldiers patrol the streets.

Drug trafficking has long been a reality in Guatemala. Involving members of the military and a handful of powerful families, drugs moved through the country for decades with little fanfare.

RODOLFO X: “It was a family business. When they started fighting over territories, and when other organizations arrived, that’s when everything started to become hellish.”

Though the history of drug trafficking is common knowledge in parts of the country like Cobán, some, like the person whose voice you just heard, preferred to remain anonymous when talking to journalists.

Mexican groups like the Gulf Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, and later the Zetas are reported to have begun moving en masse into Guatemala after 2007, after the US funded drug war in Mexico disrupted existing trafficking routes there.

Sixteen years after the end of Guatemala’s bloody internal armed conflict, the war on drugs and organized crime has become a rallying cry for increased militarization.  Some, however, contest the idea that drugs are what’s really at stake.

KAJ’KOK BA TIUL: 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.

Kaj’kok Ba Tiul lives a short drive from Cobán’s town centre. He’s a Maya Poq’omchi anthropologist and university professor.

KAJ’KOK BA TIUL: Narcotraffickers aren’t an enemy of the state. The enemy of the state are the communities, the people.

For Ba Tiul and others, the militarization justified under the discourse of the war on drugs represents a renewed push by transnational corporations and powerful nations to control natural resources, not just in Guatemala but throughout Latin America.

A few hours drive from Cobán lies Rabinal, where a Mayan priest prays for those killed in a series of massacres in the early 1980s, the deadliest years of Guatemala’s armed conflict. In the municipality of Rabinal, approximately one fifth of the population was assassinated between 1981 and 1983. Here, the majority are Mayan Achi people.

Efraín Osorio Chen is from Rio Negro, a community in Rabinal. He was 10 years old when he survived the massacres that killed his family.  I met him in Pacux, at a monument to the dead.

EFRAÍN OSORIO CHEN: 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.

Survivors like Osorio were later forced to settle in the model village of Pacux. Displaced People throughout the country were forced into military controlled model villages, built with Israeli government advice.

After the massacre that killed his family, Osorio spent two years hidden in the mountains, sleeping under trees and eating plants to stay alive. Members of his community were labeled guerrilla supporters and communists to justify the massacres.

The people of Rio Negro suffered five massacres. Beside the memorial sits Pacux’s one room community hall where the walls are painted with even more names of people killed.

JESUS TECÚ OSORIO: 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.

Jesus Tecú Osorio 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.

JESUS TECÚ OSORIO: “What was labeled as Communism, in Rio Negro, was the community’s opposition 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.”

In Guatemala, the story of Rabinal was repeated throughout the internal armed conflict. The Truth Commission says that over 200,000 people were killed and another 50,000 disappeared during the 36-year war. At that time, Guatemala was heavily militarized, with the army being the only wing of the state that had a presence throughout the entire country.

Peace accords, signed in 1996, promised to cut the military budget and reduce the army’s power and control. Demilitarization, however, remains a distant promise. Since 2000, the army has been back patrolling in the streets, on the premise of fighting organized crime.

OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: “There’s a saying that is very true, that the civilian population is to the guerrillas what water is to fish. In this case, the guerrilla can’t exist if it doesn’t have the support and collaboration of the people.”

That was the voice of Otto Pérez Molina, recorded at a model village in Nebaj, Quiché, in 1983. At that time, Pérez Molina was a Major in the Guatemalan Army. He eventually became a general and received training at the School of the Americas.

Nearly 30 years later, in September 2011, former-general Pérez Molina was elected president.

LUIS SOLANO: “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.”

Luis Solano is a Guatemalan journalist and economist who has written extensively on Otto Pérez Molina and the country’s military and economic elite.

LUIS SOLANO: “I think after his presidency, there could be legal cases around that. But right now he’s politically and legally protected as president, and no one would dare do any such thing against him right now. It doesn’t make sense, it’s better to put others on trial, those who do not have the same kind of protection.”

During his presidential campaign, Pérez Molina talked hands, head and heart: an iron fist against crime, a head for development, and a heart in support of the poorest Guatemalans.

OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: Hard line against violence and insecurity, hard line against corruption, hard line for those who respect the law, of course the head for planning, to develop to be able to do the things that are lacking, and heart to help the poorest people in the poorest areas.

With an ex-general as President, Guatemala has entered a new phase of militarization. Instead of fighting communism, however, today’s military build up is justified by the war on drugs.

Iduvina Hernandez Batres works from an unmarked office in Guatemala City’s old downtown. She’s the director of Security and Democracy, an independent organization that maintains careful watch over the armed forces.

IDUVINA HERNANDEZ BATRES: In less than 10 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,

Hernandez points out that the construction of new military bases is taking place in areas already steeped in social conflict. One of the new bases is located in an area where a proposed nickel mine has caused controversy

IDUVINA HERNANDEZ BATRES: 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, in the community, this company has already had 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.

The road to El Estor, near the new military base in Panzós, is long and winding. El Estor is a bustling town built on the shores of Lake Izabal, which feeds out into the Caribbean Sea. Most of the people in this part of the country is Maya Qeqchi.

MARIA MAGDALENA CUC CHOC: Here there are mining companies, oil companies, companies that plant monocultures like African palm, there are also rubber companies. So we enter into conflict dynamic, because we want to recuperate the land… They displace us from our properties.

Maria Magdalena Cuc Choc lives in a palm-roofed house not far from Lake Izabal in El Estor. For her, this new wave of militarization hits close to home. Her brother-in-law was killed by private security for his activism against a proposed nickel mine. Her brother is in jail for the same reason.

MARIA MAGDALENA CUC CHOC: 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, the national civil police, but in addition to that, the companies, or their owners, or large landholders, they contract our Qeqchi brothers who have already served in the military, they contract them as security guards, and then the 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.’

Hers isn’t the only community feeling the crush of militarization.

Amilcar de Jesus Pop Ac is a lawmaker and head of the congressional transparency commission. He was voted in for the first time in the same elections that brought Pérez Molina to power. Pop Ac the lone representative of Winaq, a left Indigenous party. Pop thinks national security policy in Guatemala is driven by the extractive industries, not opposition to drug trafficking.

AMILCAR DE JESUS POP AC: 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. We’re seeing that the army has detachments in all of the physical spaces where these industries and companies are setting up.

Solano says Pérez Molina’s government is seeking to empower an army weakened by the peace accords and improve an image left tarnished by decades of counter insurgency war.

LUIS SOLANO: “In the case of the current government, it seeks to consolidate and reposition the army as a political actor, as a powerful group with which the most important economic groups have to negotiate.”

The government of Guatemala isn’t militarizing social and land struggles on it own. Instead, as in the time of the internal conflict, its doing so with the help of other countries, including the US.

IDUVINA HERNANDEZ BATRES: I would way that all of the defense ministers, or if not all the ministers than at least one of the highest ranking military commanders, in a continual way over the last 20 years in Guatemala were, in some way or another, part of units trained in the School of the Americas, trained by the US Army, by the US defense department, and what this has meant, in Guatemala is that there is a tendency for military authorities to have a training oriented towards identifying their own society as the enemy.”

The School of the Americas, now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is a military training facility at Fort Benning, Georgia. Its alumni include some of Latin America’s most infamous human rights violators.

Beyond training, in 2008, the US government launched CARSI, the Central America Regional Security Initiative. Until now, nearly half a billion dollars has been spent on the program. According to the State Department, CARSI includes money for equipping police, beefing up border patrol and helping Central American armies fight drug cartels.

The aid comes despite an ongoing ban of Defense Department assistance to Guatemala’s army.  That ban, however, doesn’t apply to the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s relationship with the army.

CLAUDIA SAMAYOA: “The DEA cooperates with the Guatemalan army as it does with all other armies, through funding, for example, for boats, for helicopters, airplanes, of training for members of the military, and information sharing especially regarding the seizure and confiscation of drugs.”

Claudia Samayoa is the coordinator UDEFEGUA, a group dedicated to monitoring attacks and threats against activists.

CLAUDIA SAMAYOA: “Unfortunately we haven’t been able to convince the DEA that narcotrafficking shouldn’t be fought using the army, because it generates a series of legal problems and generates impunity.”

Of late, US assistance to Guatemalan forces has gone beyond training and equipment purchases. In August, the US Navy announced that 200 Marines had been deployed to Guatemala to fight drug cartels off the Pacific Coast.

The agreement between the US and Guatemala to allow US combat troops in the country didn’t go before congress. It was formalized just two months after four Indigenous people in Ahuas, Honduras were killed when State Department helicopters steered by Guatemalan pilots and carrying US Drug Enforcement Agents – opened fire on a boat carrying civilians.

MARIO POLANCO: Look, I don’t think a little country like Guatemala is on Obama’s priority list. He likely knows how to find it on the map, but I don’t think it’s a priority for him… But the head of the Southern Command, for example, he has a much clearer idea of the details.

Mario Polanco, from Guatemala City’s Mutual Aid Group, met with members of the US military’s Southern Command earlier in 2012.

MARIO POLANCO: What they told us was that it was like an action to hit the boats, boats that possibly, that they suspect were carrying drugs, pushing them, like hitting them with a hammer, right, towards Guatemalan territory, towards Guatemala’s maritime territory, where they would be caught. At this point, I’m not sure if it has worked. I also am not aware of soldiers on land in Guatemala, well, I think there’s some… I’ve seen a few of those very large helicopters, but we haven’t felt any concrete impacts.

The US Embassy in Guatemala claims that the Marines left on October 14^th. Local media reports that they were responsible for the intercepting 10 shipments of narcotics, and the arrest of 14 people. US troops do have an ongoing presence in other parts of the country, however. In particular, they’re active in Cobán, at a Regional Peacekeepers Training Force Centre operated by the Guatemalan Army under the auspices of the United Nations.

Over the past years, US Marines have regularly carried out medical brigades in communities near the base…BUT Kajkok Ba Tiul says Marines also visited areas in Alta Verapaz where anti-dam protests took place.

KAJK’OK BA TIUL: 17 kilometers from here in the community of El Rancho, Southern Command came and built a hospital. Why did they build a hospital there? Months before we had blocked the highways there to prevent the construction of two dams. We were removed from the side, and later the Southern Command came and said ‘hey, we’re going to build you a hospital.” Now what’s going on there? Who looks bad? You guys, because you got us to block highways, you didn’t give us anything, unlike the gringos, it’s a lie that the gringos are bad, look, they built us the best health centre we have.

Local people I met with were happy to receive medical attention from US Marines, but they didn’t want to go on the record.

Ba Tiul, who spent decades in exile during the war, thinks it is clear that today, Indigenous people and communities are once again seen by officials as “insurgents” in Guatemala.

KAJK’OK BA TIUL: The insurgent today isn’t someone who is armed against the state, but that community or that person who is challenging the state for the control of the goods of nature or of natural resources.

Increasing militarization tends to come with heightened social polarization. In October, soldiers opened fire on a group of Mayan Kiche people protesting against high energy prices, constitutional reforms and changes to the teacher training program in Totonicapan., leaving at least six dead.

Members of the business elite and government officials initially defended the actions of the army – including the President.

OTTO PÉREZ MOLINA: “What we understand at this time is that it was provoked by a private security guard who opened fire.”

Pérez Molina’s claim that it a security guard was responsible came the day after the shooting, and flew in the face of eyewitness testimony. Nine soldiers have since been jailed for the shooting.

The massacre at Totonicapan sent a strong message to activists throughout the country. Just outside of Guatemala City, dozens of community members have been holding a permanent camp against a Nevada based mining company. Yolanda Oquelí, one of the most visible public figures of their struggle, was shot and nearly killed in June.

YOLANDA OQUELÍ: “I worry about what has been taking place in other places, like recently in Totonicapan, it’s very worrying, very difficult, we put ourselves in their place, because we are also here resisting and we don’t know in what moment the aggression could come for us.”

As women prepared lunch for the people present at the protest camp, Oquelí spoke out against the government of Otto Pérez Molina.

YOLANDA OQUELÍ: This government has been a very repressive government, a very arrogant government, which has always tried to provoke a fight, so that they can do what they want, together with the extractive companies.”

Even after 36 years of intense counterinsurgency war, and an ongoing reality of threats and killings of those who speak out, communities continue to resist displacement and assimilation. According to human rights monitor Claudia Samayoa, some of these same communities have been presented as criminal elements in the context of the war on drugs.

CLAUDIA SAMAYOA: “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.”

It is clear that the state could play a different role in communities impacted by the drug war. The root causes of community cooperation with narco-traffickers: structural impunity and violence, the marginalization of poor communities, and a lack of basic services and opportunities, are not addressed through the militarization of the drug trade. On the contrary, these situations can be aggravated by a militarized approach to drug trafficking.

CLAUDIA SAMAYOA: “I think it is very complicated, to make a criminal matter, and much worse to create a situation of combat against an internal enemy, out of a situation that is connected to the state and failures of the state. These communities could be rescued if the state provided services and generated rule of law instead of persecuting them and calling them, as has happened in a reoccurring way in our countries, narcotraffickers.”

Today’s documentary, “Communities in the Crosshairs: The Drug War in Guatemala” was produced by Dawn Paley in Guatemala City. Shannon Young is our documentary editor and Jeanne Etter is our technical production team at KPFA in Berkeley.

To hear this and other FSRN documentaries online, visit our website at fsrn.org. We’ll be back tomorrow with our regular newscast. Thanks for listening. In Los Angeles, I’m Dorian Merina.