The Kaibiles, the ruthless U.S.-trained Guatemalan state militia infamous for their role in killing civilians during Guatemala’s civil war, are being recruited in large numbers to violent Mexican drug gangs. Mexico’s Zetas drug cartel is paying large sums to a multitude of Kaibiles forces to pass on the training they received from the United States military.
In May, Guatemalan military forces began to enforce a state of siege in the Guatemalan province of Peten, after the Mexican drug gang Zetas suspected of ties to Kaibiles massacred 27 farmers.
Mexican authorities recently captured Osvaldo Garcia Montoya, one of the most brutal of the new drug lords in the region. He has admitted responsibility for killing more than 600 people, most of them rivals who were beheaded and further dismembered. Montoya was a former Mexican military officer who had been trained by U.S. forces in Guatemala at the Kaibil Academy.
Guatemala receives approximately $1oo million in aid annually from the U.S., despite a record of corruption and ties to the drug gangs. The former president, Alfonso Portillo, is in prison on charges of massive corruption. Scores of police chiefs, senior military commanders, and defense ministers have been purged in an attempt to crack down on security forces with drug-trafficking ties.
Guatemala’s President Alvaro Colom said recently, “We seriously underestimated just how deep the infiltration of organised crime was in our institutions.” Yet American money, weapons, and elite training continues to be devoted to Guatemala.
(photo by DVIDS)
More meddling by the imperialist US causing unintended consequences. Obama has 100,000,000 for murderous nonsense in Guatemala but refuses to fund school lunch program here in America and cuts AIDS research as well. 100 million would go a long way to fund these programs. This is a failure of his leadership not Republican obstructionism.
These and other consequences are intended good friend. The ties between central American drug cartels and the White House go back to the 1950s. Operation 40 was a 1950s manifestation of what a certain punk rich-kid vice-president's assistant at the White House developed for implementing criminal American foreign policy and enforcing illegal drug distribution in the U.S.. The reason for the failure of the law enforcement agencies to curtail this spread of dangerous drugs among american youth was a national heirarchy with organized crime in the White House. A simple idea that has had the American people running for the nipple (or TV set) for over 50 years. Only a fool would deny this.
John Glaser has no idea what he is talking about. The Kaibiles are not a "state militia". They are regular members of the Guatemala Army, in fact the Guatemalan Special Forces. Second, there was no "civil war" in Guatemala, there was a decades-long Communist insurgency, something very different from a "civil war." Third, it has been a long time since we trained the Kaibiles, the Guatemalans are perfectly capable of training them themselves. Fourth, so former Guatemala soldiers have joined criminal gangs. So what? That is hardly our fault or that of the Guatemalan government. It is our fault that the U.S. government, under the guise of "human rights" dismantled the only effective security forces in Guatemala. And we are surprised when this is the result?
doing what they are trained to do
I guess there is a first time for everything in the drug war.