Linked Killings Undercut Trust In Guatemala

Culture of Corruption, Impunity Exposed

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 after that, 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 deeply 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 United States each year.

"It's a paradise for organized crime," Anders Kompass, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights representative in Guatemala, said in an interview. "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 here that the full truth about last month's assassinations will be known any time soon. The question now is, whom can the public trust?

On Tuesday, the Guatemalan Congress overwhelmingly approved a no-confidence motion against Interior Minister Carlos Vielmann, whose domain includes prisons. Now President Oscar Berger must decide whether to remove Vielmann from office or launch a battle with Congress by vetoing the decision.

Meanwhile, Congress has stonewalled a U.N. proposal to create an independent commission to investigate corruption in Guatemala. Vielmann, a wealthy businessman who is fighting to keep a job and a paycheck he says he does not need, said in an interview that he supports the U.N. proposal.

Speculation about the killings last month has stoked a public clamor for answers here and in neighboring El Salvador, as well as a number of conspiracy theories.

"People don't want to believe that the reality is simpler, more ironic and more stupid," Guatemala's national police chief, Erwin Sperisen, a Vielmann ally, said in an interview. "It wasn't a great conspiracy. It was a series of coincidental events. But the people don't want to believe. They want a soap opera, a spy drama, a James Bond movie."

In the weeks since the killings, government officials have outlined their version of events: The politicians were kidnapped Feb. 19 on their way to a meeting in Guatemala City of the Central American Parliament, a regional planning body of which all three were elected members. Guatemalan policemen killed them but were soon caught, in part because a global satellite positioning system in their car placed them at the scene of the crime, 20 miles outside Guatemala City, according to this version.