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.