What holds Guatemala back: 4 - Insecurity

The latest PNC-released stats covering reported crimes throughout the year up to the end of the first week of December make sobering reading:

5,834 dead and 6,468 injured in numerous acts of violence. This includes the murders of 162 bus drivers, 6 ayudantes and 2 bus inspectors.

Plus...
- 1,250 people 'disappeared'
- 183 kidnappings
- 350 rapes
- 995 thefts of commercial property
- 1,808 thefts of firearms
- 5,515 stolen vehicles
- 78 attacks on tourists

August seems to be the peak month for both visitors to the country (171,235 in '08) and for murders (616 in '08).

What holds Guatemala back: 3 - The Narcos

In the first 11 months of this year 5400 people died violently here, compared to 4600 in the same period of 2007 - not all narcotics related for sure - but the traffickers have to shoulder most of the blame for the breaking wave of murders which has swept over Guatemala since 'Peace' was formally established a decade ago. (Alternatively, you might want to point the finger at the cocaine snorters themselves.)

So here in this comparatively small nation, more people are dying as a result of organised criminality serving a largely external demand for narcotic stimulation than as a consequence of the actions of Islamist terrorists the world over (...or indeed, as a result of misguided 'War on Terror' policies designed to dispatch said Islamists to paradise.)

Before the 'War on Terror' we had the 'War on Drugs'. Such is the resillience of demand for blow in the West that repressive policies in Colombia simply helped shift the cartel distribution structures further north. And whenever local police and armed forces are co-opted into this battle they become corrupted, along with a host of other key institutions through which piping hot money continually flows.

70% of the cocaine bound for the USA - where 40% of the global production of that drug is consumed - passes through Guatemala. You can imagine the effect this is having on its already endemic problems of impunity and the practice of shadow economics.

Even if the Guatemalan state wanted to fight the narcos the way they have been fought in Colombia, it doesn't have the capacity. (The limited amount of technology which exists here for telephone interception seems to have been wasted on bugging the Presidential Palace!)

When the Peace Accords were signed a good part of the officer corps of the Guatemalan army was pensioned off, so it can come as no surprise that, compared to say Mexico where active colonels are in the pay of the narcos, here in Guatemala it is retired colonels who are the narcos.

And then we have the maras, street-gangs like the Salvatrucha and the Mara 18, which evolved in LA during the Cold War and were recklessly re-exported back to Central America by the gringos when it ended. For the past couple of decades these cholos have been the nihilistic footsoldiers of the bigger players at state and transnational level.

But the sense of surging crisis in 2008 is being driven by the invasive activities of the Mexican cartels. Guatemala has an underpopulated 950km border with Mexico packed with large estates, many of which have informal airfields. The owners of these estates are occasionally reporting - though more often not - some serious intimidation by the narcos from over the border, which in many cases forces them to sell up.

Last week President Colom sent the army to investigate a number of frontier fincas and has called for a pan-regional military response, a call which President Calderón in Mexico has rejected. (Guatemala is apparently a carpet under which he can sweep his own quite serious problems in this respect.)

During the course of 2008 there have been three high profile shoot-outs between Mexican and Guatemalan narcos which together resulted in 44 fatalities.

Prime suspect in the instigation of such massacres is an armed battalion called Los Zetas which works for the Gulf Cartel. Led by Heriberto 'The Executioner' Lazano, Los Zetas are said to have evolved out of GAFE, Mexico's elite airborne special forces unit. Some of them are also believed to have belonged to Guatemala's similarly Israeli/American-trained Kaibiles, and according to the Fiscal General de Guatemala 80 of the 300 known Zetas are based on this side of the border right now.

This unit is quite possibly better equipped than British forces in Afghanistan, with kevlar vests and ballistic helmets, 50 cal. and MP5 machine guns, grenade launchers, AR-15 and AK-47 assault rifles, helicopters and ground-to-air missiles.

What holds Guatemala back: 2 - The State

From the outside Guatemala's state looks like one of those houses that someone decided to start building before they had the finances to finish it. We have several fine examples nearby. The ground floor is more or less complete, but the next level up is little more than a concrete terrace through which rusty iron rods poke skyward, testifying to the delayed ambitions of the occupants.

Like many of the neighbouring states this was one whose early growth was paid for by various kinds of inflationary financing and debt, because the wealthy haven't ever been willing to cough up. 

Even in the democratic era - and in spite of some clear stipulations in the peace accords - total taxation as a share of GDP is well below the developed country average of 29%. Excluding social security contributions the figure here is closer to 10% - and it is said by leading economists that the state needs a tax take of at least a fifth of GDP in order to provide basic public goods. (Such as the education and the police service which will be covered in later posts.)

The currently parlous state of the world's economy is not going to help much either. Fiscal authorities have reported a take last month of Q2.4bn, the lowest of 2008, and 7.9% lower than the equivalent revenues collected in November 2007.

Still, there has been a measure of successful decentralisation over the last few decades and both Antigua and Guatemala City, benefit from local government by mini-states run by apparently competent and reform-minded alcaldes. In the capital for example, Arzú has successfully transplanted Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa's Transmilenio - a modern transportation system (itself based on Brazil's Curitiba) in which articulated buses run along their own carriageways with fixed stops that are more like London's DLR than a common-or-garden bus stop. (Here it has been dubbed the Transmetro)

But then there's a pending post in this series entitled 'Neglect of the Countryside'.

What holds Guatemala back: 1 - Carelessness

A new occasional series, and one which comes in no particular order. (Nor is for that matter, necessarily complete!)

No country which loses stuff so easily - public money, automatic weapons...World Cup fixtures, can really aspire to favourable comparisons with some of the world's plucky, high-achieving smaller nations such as Ireland and Finland.

For example, yeserday Guatemala’s director of the National Civilian Police force (PNC), Marlene Blanco Lapola, informed Congress that more than 2,000 automatic weapons have disappeared from her inventory, including AK-47 assault rifles and Israeli-made Uzi machine guns. Oops.

This is however the same Congress which earlier this year lost a substantial part of its annual budget because someone thought it would be a good idea to invest it in an offshore 'growth' fund.