Guatemala City – It began with four charred bodies on a dirt road.
The victims had been kidnapped, investigators concluded, and two of them burned alive. The men who were found that day in February on a ranch outside Guatemala City turned out to be three Salvadoran politicians and their chauffeur.
Among them was Eduardo D’Aubuisson, son of Roberto D’Aubuisson, the late founder of El Salvador’s ruling party and the alleged architect of death squads in the Salvadoran civil war.
Three days later, four Guatemalan policemen were accused of the killings and arrested. Three days later, with international attention trained on this country, the officers’ throats were slashed and they were shot in their cells. The prison murders have not been solved.
The back-to-back sets of killings – each chillingly professional and brazen – are exposing the depth of corruption and impunity in a nation still struggling to right itself 11 years after the end of more than three decades of civil war. “A Pandora’s box (is opening),” said Salvadoran police chief Rodrigo Avila.
Over the past several weeks, some of Guatemala’s most powerful political figures have been forced to acknowledge that their government and criminal justice system are infiltrated by organized crime. Human-rights activists have responded by blaming the corrupting influence of drug traffickers, who make fortunes funneling up to 300 metric tons of cocaine to the U.S. each year.
“It’s a paradise for organized crime,” said Anders Kompass, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Guatemala. “The state apparatus is weak. The impunity rate is very high. This has shown that organized crime has penetrated at a much higher level than we ever thought.”
Guatemala has one of the highest murder rates in Latin America, with 30 killings for every 100,000 residents in 2005, according to the Observatory of Violence and Crime, which the United Nations set up in Honduras. Few of the 5,000 killings in the country each year are solved, and there is scant hope that the full truth about last month’s assassinations will be known anytime soon. The question now is, whom can the public trust?
