Pubdate: Sat, 11 Mar 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A01 - Front Page
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: N. C. Aizenman, Washington Post Staff Writer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Guatemala
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Drug+Enforcement+Administration
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Mexico
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Colombia
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?236 (Corruption - Outside U.S.)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

ENDURANCE OF CORRUPTION SHAKES GUATEMALA ANEW

Hopes for Anti-Drug Leader End With Arrest

Guatemala's top anti-drug cop laughed out loud last fall when U.S. 
drug agents came to arrest him at a hotel near Dulles Airport on 
cocaine smuggling charges.

"He thought it was a joke," recalled one of the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration agents, who used a phony invitation to a training 
exercise to lure Adan Castillo to the United States last November. 
"Well, for about 15 seconds. Then the reality hit."

And when reality hit in Guatemala, the sense of shock was just as profound.

Many had been counting on the new leader of Guatemala's equivalent of 
the DEA to put an end to years of official collusion with drug 
traffickers. Instead, the emerging details of the five-month U.S.-led 
sting operation that netted Castillo and two of his deputies -- all 
of whom have pleaded not guilty and now await trial in U.S. District 
Court -- offer a vivid illustration of the pervasive corruption that 
has undermined Guatemala's battle against narco-trafficking.

The stakes of that fight, meanwhile, are growing higher by the day.

As neighboring Mexico has strengthened its air and coastal patrols, 
Guatemala has emerged as the favored route of traffickers exporting 
cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

U.S. officials estimate that smugglers transport 200 to 300 metric 
tons of Colombian cocaine annually to the United States through 
Central America. Drug smugglers are attracted by the jungle in the 
Peten, a virtually unpatrolled area about the size of Maryland along 
Guatemala's northern border with Mexico. Over the past five years, 
traffickers have been landing increasing numbers of aircraft stuffed 
with cocaine into the Peten, then loading their contraband onto 
vehicles for overland transport through Mexico.

Drug traffickers seeking to solidify their foothold in the Peten have 
bought up large tracts of land and paid for medical care, power 
generators and soccer teams in a bid to win the loyalty of 
impoverished locals who were long neglected by the central government.

That effort has drawn alarmed comparisons to Colombia in the 1980s. 
There, right-wing paramilitary squads and leftist guerrillas who 
turned to cocaine trafficking established strongholds in an enormous 
swath of territory that the Colombian government never fully controlled.

"We're not Colombia yet," Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann said 
during a recent interview in Guatemala City. "But if things continue 
like this, I think it's only a matter of time before we get to that situation."

While the United States has helped other Central American countries 
combat drug trafficking, much aid to Guatemala is banned under a 1990 
law passed in response to human rights abuses committed by its 
military during a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996.

The corruption spawned during those decades may have peaked under 
President Alfonso Portillo, who fled to Mexico after his four-year 
term ended in January 2004. He has been charged with embezzling more 
than $15 million, and at least 10 former officials from his 
government, including his vice president, are in jail on corruption charges.

By contrast, the current president, Oscar Berger, and his top 
ministers appear to have the confidence of U.S. officials in 
Guatemala. But Michael O'Brien, DEA attache at the U.S. Embassy in 
Guatemala City, said they amount to only a thin veneer of honest 
leaders "presiding over what has historically been a cesspool of corruption."

Col. Mark Wilkins, the senior U.S. military official based in 
Guatemala, agreed.

"It's hard to put your finger on any institution in the judicial, 
legislative, executive branches or even private enterprise that 
hasn't been deeply penetrated at some point over the past few years," he said.

Guatemalans have a saying about the bribe that drug traffickers are 
rumored to offer newly hired top officials: "The $10,000 cannon shot 
- -- who can resist it?"

Still, Adan Castillo seemed a safe bet. Over a long career in the 
police force, Castillo had acquired a reputation as a family man who 
liked to hold prayer sessions for officers who shared his evangelical 
Christian faith. Fairly tall and thin, with delicate, birdlike 
features, he struck Guatemalan officials and journalists alike as 
unassuming, friendly and serious about his work.

Vielmann, the interior minister, said his first inkling that there 
might be more to the picture came when Castillo visited him in his 
spacious office shortly after his appointment. Sitting back on a blue 
leather couch and sipping a cup of coffee, Castillo casually raised 
the possibility of making a deal with one of the trafficking groups 
operating in Guatemala, Vielmann recalled. In exchange for 
information that would allow his agents to seize drugs from a rival 
group, the unit would leave the first group alone. Castillo "was 
careful," Vielmann said.

"He never said that he'd actually contacted any groups. He just put 
it like, 'I've heard that they've done this in other countries,' " 
Vielmann said.

Then, last summer, federal prosecutors allege, an informant told 
officials at the DEA that a trafficker who was seeking to move large 
quantities of cocaine through Guatemala had told him to approach 
officers of the SAIA, the Spanish abbreviation for Castillo's agency.

The news was particularly troubling to U.S. authorities because the 
SAIA had only recently been created to replace an earlier 
drug-fighting unit deemed so riddled with corruption that it was 
disbanded in 2002. The U.S. government had spent millions of dollars 
on equipment and training for both units.

According to court documents, the informant's initial contact in the 
SAIA was Rubilio Orlando Palacios, the young, burly head of security 
at the bustling port of Santo Tomas, on Guatemala's Caribbean coast.

On Sept. 1, the documents allege, Orlando took the informant to the 
entrance of a hotel in Guatemala City, where Castillo was waiting at 
the wheel of a gray Ford Explorer. They clambered in, along with 
Castillo's deputy, Jorge Aguilar Garcia. Inside the vehicle, Castillo 
told the informant that he and Aguilar did not expect to remain in 
their jobs much longer but that they would make the most of their 
power while they were still in charge.

In a series of similar meetings with the informant, Castillo hammered 
out the details of the first drug shipment, unaware that he was being 
audio- and videotaped each time. According to court documents, the 
plan was for the informant to arrange for two separate 2,000-kilogram 
loads of cocaine to be transported by container to the port of Santo 
Tomas. Orlando, who controlled which containers were searched, would 
ensure their cargo was not found. This would be followed by a 300- to 
500-kilogram shipment that Castillo could arrange for SAIA agents to 
discover so that it would look like the unit was making meaningful seizures.

It is not clear from court documents how much money Castillo and the 
others planned on receiving in return. At one point they allegedly 
discussed charging the informant $200,000 for allowing cocaine 
shipments into the port and $300,000 for a black-and-yellow SAIA 
vehicle to guard the cocaine during transport from the port to the 
Mexican border.

"Once you arrive to the town of Tecun Uman, we will disappear," 
Castillo allegedly said. On two occasions, the informant allegedly 
paid Castillo $5,000 and then $10,000 in good-faith money.

The DEA, of course, derailed Castillo's alleged plans. Taking 
advantage of Castillo's frequent complaints that the SAIA was not 
receiving enough instruction in methods of drug interdiction, O'Brien 
proposed that Aguilar and Orlando participate in an exercise at the 
administration's facility at the U.S. Marine base in Quantico. The 
topic was to be port security.

All three were arrested Nov. 15 before the purported training was due 
to begin. The next day, Guatemalan officials searched Castillo's 
office at SAIA headquarters in Guatemala City and announced that they 
had found $22,000 and several packets of cocaine.

Guatemalan officials said they are now combating drug traffickers 
with aggressive new initiatives. A bill that would criminalize 
conspiracy to traffic drugs and close other loopholes in the legal 
code has been introduced in the National Assembly. A team of about 
800 Guatemalan troops, police officers and civilian officials also 
recently established bases in the Peten and has started patrolling.

And once again the SAIA is being restructured, with members now 
required to undergo frequent lie detector tests. On a recent morning, 
about a dozen newly graduated cadets from the police academy crowded 
around a metal table in a room at the SAIA's white stucco 
headquarters to hand in release forms for their background checks.

"It's an opportunity to give the police a whole new image," said 
William Estuardo Najabro Flores, 22, sounding a theme echoed by many 
in the group. "Everyone in the country says the police are corrupt. 
We want to show that's not the case."
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