GUATEMALA CITY — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised Wednesday that the U.S. government would spend nearly $300 million this year helping governments in Central America confront the mafias that smuggle cocaine to American consumers.
“The United States will back you,” she said at a regional summit. “We know demand for drugs rests mostly in my own country.”
On a visit to El Salvador in March, President Barack Obama said the United States would give $200 million to fight the street gangs and drug traffickers who have given the region the highest homicide rates in the world.
The increase announced by Clinton represents repackaging of money dedicated to other programs as well as heightened concern among U.S. officials that the fragile democracies of Central America are struggling with surging criminality fueled by the movement of drugs north and weapons south.
“We know the statistics — the murder rates surpassing civil-war levels,” Clinton said in a reference to the Cold War-era conflicts that consumed Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador in 1980s and 1990s. “We know the wave of violence also threatens our own country.”
Leaders called the two-day summit historic, as Central American nations put aside old rivalries to devise a regional plan to bolster security. It includes professionalizing the police forces, training judges, reforming corrupt prisons, sharing intelligence and equipment, and trying to divert poor young people away from lives of crime.
The seven countries of Central America have proposed 22 projects, which would cost about $900 million, and the leaders stressed in their remarks Wednesday that they did not have the money to do it alone.
“For us, it is the difference between life and death,” said Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom.
Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter- American Development Bank, said the fund would spend $500 million over the next two years supporting the Central American plan.
