Central America: Return of the death squads

[Judi Lynn]

Central America: Return of the death squads

Responding to drug-related violence is a convenient pretext for the region’s elites to achieve some rather different objectives, writes Annie Bird.

August 2012

On 23 August last year, around 300 campesinos from the Nueva Esperanza community, near the Laguna del Tigre Natural Park in northern Guatemala, were evicted from the lands to which they held title and forced across the border into Mexico. Interior minister Carlos Menocal justified the action by claiming the families assisted drug traffickers, though he presented no evidence.

While drug trafficking corridors have proliferated through Central America’s natural reserves over the past decade, Nueva Esperanza’s real crime appears to have been that it was located in the way of the Cuatro Balam mega-tourism project. Cuatro Balam is a planned 14,000 square mile tourism complex amid the Maya Biosphere cluster of natural reserves and an array of Mayan archaeological sites. They are to be united by a proposed electric train and linked to Chiapas, Mexico, via a new highway.

Three years before the eviction, Guatemalan president Álvaro Colom announced plans to clear the area of ‘invaders and drug traffickers’ to make room for Cuatro Balam. The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) began funding the project in 2009 and on 30 June 2010, Colom inaugurated Cuatro Balam, announcing that six military posts would be installed in Laguna del Tigre.

Nueva Esperanza is just one of dozens of communities across Central America that have recently been evicted, threatened, or repressed by powerful interests promoting large-scale development projects, including tourism corridors, open-pit mines, biofuel plantations, hydroelectric dams, carbon-credit forests and more. The violence has come from the state, in the name of the ‘war on drugs’ that is spilling over from Mexico and Colombia, and from multinational corporations bent on advancing investments. The result is the same: communities that suffered through the civil wars of the 1980s and 1990s are again faced with violence as they defend their land against international interests.

More:
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/central-america-return-of-the-death-squads/

[flamingdem]

1. K&R

[Octafish]

2. It's the Way of the Wealthy

War on the Weak.

[Bacchus4.0]

3. story doesn't add up. Cuatro Balam is a tourist/conservation program

from what I can tell. Not a guatemalan disney land. the 14,000 square miles indicated in the story raises a big red flag. the connections between the archaeological tourism, biodiversity conservation, greedy developers, and death squads doesn't seem to be there.



The title of the OP "Central America: Return of the Death Squads" but inexplicably fails to mention this:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/05/16/us-guatemala-massacre-idUSTRE74E3MM20110516

At least 27 people were found dead in a Guatemalan village near the border with Mexico Sunday morning in one of the worst mass killings in the country in a generation, local police said.

The bloody incident started when raiders attacked the small town of Caserio La Bomba about 275 miles north of the capital, police said.

Two women were among the victims of the attack, said police, who were trying to determine the exact time of the attack and searching for more bodies. Many of the victims were shot and beheaded, police said.

"This is the worst massacre we have seen in modern times," police spokesman Donald Gonzalez told Reuters, saying it was hard to remember a mass killing on this scale since Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended in 1996.


http://latindispatch.com/2011/05/16/28-dead-in-guatemalan-massacre-police-suspect-drug-cartel-involvement/

Police said the motive behind the slayings is not known, but could be related to fights between drug cartels that are known to vie for control of the area. Police are investigating a link between Sunday’s violence and the killing on Saturday of Haroldo León.




On the other hand, though the government did remove villagers from another nearby area, there is no report of deaths.

http://www.insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/1494-guatemala-anti-drug-operations-force-refugees-into-mexico

[pscot]

4. Coming soon

to a small town near you.