Those who trawl through left-leaning online news sites and blogs will have noticed the emergence of a new wave of stories about secret US bases across Latin America and hidden agendas behind the ‘small footprint’ US military cooperation activities in the region. One item has been absent: the very overt involvement of the US military in a joint operation with the Guatemalan armed forces, inside Guatemala, against drug traffickers.
It was left to the Guatemalan authorities to announce that 171 US Marines would be deployed next to Guatemala’s three armed services in a joint operation against drug traffickers acting along the country’s Pacific coast. This represents an extension into Guatemala of Operación Martillo, a multinational drive launched in February against transnational criminal activities in Central American coastal waters, headed by the US Southern Command’s Joint Interagency Task Force-South (JIATF-S).
On 20 August President Otto Pérez Molina said that the Marines had arrived in Guatemala two weeks earlier, and that the ‘strategic command posts’ of the operation would be installed in the Guatemalan navy’s Pacific base at Puerto Quetzal and the parachute brigade’s base at Puerto San José (both in Escuintla).
He explained that when Operación Martillo began in Honduras in the first months of 2012, the traffickers that had been operating in the Gulf of Honduras changed their routes and began to send their shipments to Guatemala’s southern coast. Evidence began to appear several months ago, he said, that shipments of cocaine were being transferred off the Pacific coast to smaller coastal craft for landing, then sent overland to Mexico.
US Southern Command (Southcom) announced this development in its blog Diálogo by running, without commentary, a report by the news agency AFP.
Defence minister Ulises Anzueto expanded on the President’s announcement and was reported by AFP as stating that about 2,000 members of the Guatemalan military would take part in the joint operation, which is planned to last 120 days, with the possibility, depending on results, of an extension for another 120. The newswire Efe however quoted Erick Escobedo, the defence ministry spokesman, as saying that just 250 Guatemalan soldiers would be taking part. The US contingent (which includes civilian employees as well as Marines) will be stationed at Guatemala’s southern air command in Retalhuleu, the central air command in the capital and the base of the parachute brigade. The joint operation will cover the six departments along Guatemala’s Pacific coast (though it will begin later in San Marcos, which abuts Mexico, because of delays in the arrival of communications equipment and other technical snags).
So far Operación Martillo has involved the participation of 11 countries: the US, Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Canada
■ Just before President Pérez Molina’s announcement of the joint operation, interior minister, Mauricio López Bonilla, announced that Guatemala has become a cocaine producer, on the strength of the discovery of a shipment of 17.6 tonnes of cocaine paste, presumably for local processing.
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