Security & Strategic Review - September 2013 (ISSN 1741-4202)

The resurgence of violence in Guatemala, doubts about the gang truce and the working of the judiciary in El Salvador and about the state’s capabilities in Honduras are the background against which the prospect is again being raised of Central America’s Northern Triangle becoming — or having already become — a collection of ‘narco-states’. Guatemala provides a useful test case for the plausibility of this outlook.

In late August the online monitoring service InSight Crime drew attention to a paper by Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants, entitled Central America’s Northern Triangle: A Time of Turmoil and Transition. He argues that the penetration of this subregion by Mexican cartels has made them the de-facto authority, rendering the state ‘almost non-functional’. Indeed, he claims that the three countries have already passed the ‘tipping point’ beyond which they no longer fully control their territory. He nuances this saying, ‘There are virtually no “ungoverned spaces” in the region. What has changed is that the authority is less and less often the state.’ As a result of the pervasive corruption of the law enforcement agencies, the judiciary and the public administration, he says, ‘The state itself at times becomes a part of the criminal enterprise.’

The difficulty with this scenario is that much of it precedes the penetration of the Northern Triangle by the Mexican cartels — or, to be more precise, their becoming the theatre for the violent confrontation of the Zetas, relatively new arrivals, and the longer established Sinaloa/Pacífico cartel. To this must be added the rapid pace of change in the situations on the ground. Farah’s paper dwells on the role played by the Zetas in Guatemala,  but less than a month after having drawn attention to this study, InSight Crime was talking about the ‘fall’ of the Zetas.

The deeply rooted corruption of the Guatemalan establishment and the grip held in that country by ‘hidden powers’ led to the establishment of Cicig, the UN-backed anti-impunity commission, in 2006. Now that the end of Cicig’s mandate is looming, outside observers and Guatemalans themselves are trying to work out just how much it has achieved. In neighbouring El Salvador there was an outcry in late August about how the courts were finding reasons not to prosecute the suspected leaders of the ‘Texis cartel’; by mid-September the authorities were celebrating the disruption of that organisation (see below).

Changing situations

Another modifier of the scenario is that sweeping generalisations and assumptions make it harder to discern the actual size of the problem. Back in January, Carlos Mendoza of the consulting firm Central American Business Intelligence (Cabi) and Claudia Méndez Arriata of elPeriódico put together a study entitled Siete mitos sobre la violencia homicida en Guatemala (‘Seven Myths about Homicidal Violence in Guatemala’) which punctures several misconceptions about the extent to which Guatemala as a whole is prey to violence, the drugs trade is the main cause of violent deaths, victims were themselves involved in crime, and more police is the answer to violence.

Cautious as Cabi is to put things into perspective, rapid change can overtake its readings. In March, analysing the data on homicide that had shown a steady upward trend since last November, it pointed out that January figures (the latest available at the time) suggested that the longer-run trend appeared to be ‘stagnating’. By the time figures for the first half of this year surfaced, there was a clear year-on-year increase of almost 8%.

In the first half of 2013 the national police (PNC) reported 2,735 cases of intentional homicide countrywide, or 12% more than in the same period of 2012. The institute of forensic sciences, Inacif, reported 3,122 cases, up 7.8% (Inacif does not discriminate between intentional and unintentional or accidental homicides). The number of cases has fallen steadily for four months running (May-August), but the annual increase remained virtually unchanged.

In July, deputy security minister Edi Juárez said that a study conducted by the interior ministry had determined that 25% of all homicides were attributable to ‘organised crime’ (a phrase almost synonymous with drug-trafficking organisations) and 25% to the maras (street gangs). Inacif has reported that the main cause of death among male homicide victims was the use of firearms.

Pinpointing the hotspots

One thing that has not changed substantially is the high concentration of homicides. Full data for 2012 shows that seven of Guatemala’s 22 departments (Guatemala, Escuintla, Chiquimula, Petén, Izabal, Jutiapa and Santa Rosa) accounted jointly for just over 71% of the national total. Another seven accounted for 20%, and eight accounted for 8.5%. In terms of rates per 100,000 inhabitants, three departments were below the ‘epidemic’ threshold of 10. At the other end of the scale, 10 departments had more than four times that level — four of them (Chiquimula, Zacapa, Escuintla and Santa Rosa) ranged from six to nine times higher. Partial data for the first half of this year do not show much change in the list of major hotspots.

Even this does not tell the whole story; concentration is even greater at municipal level. Fourteen of Guatemala’s 334 municipalities accounted jointly for 47% of all homicides; among these, eight accounted for 38% of the country total and one, Guatemala, for 18%. In the first half of this year Guatemala city accounted for 36% of the homicides reported by Inacif.

Flow of drugs

In early September, interior minister Mauricio López Bonilla said that the seizures of drugs this year were lower than in the past couple of years, largely because the tighter controls imposed by the authorities had led the traffickers to reduce the volume of individual shipments to try and escape detection. ‘If previously they would transport 100 kilos and were intercepted,’ he said, ‘that would be a major blow to the organisation; now they prefer to move smaller quantities in a greater number of vehicles.’ He also ventured that, as a result of the disruption of some gangs by the authorities, the traffickers may have chosen to move greater volumes by sea than by road or air. The public prosecution service has announced that between January 2012 and June this year, 119 persons suspected of involvement in drug trafficking were arrested.

The PNC’s antinarcotics intelligence unit, Sgaia, has reported that 2,236kg of cocaine were seized in the first eight months of 2013. In the whole of 2012 seizures amounted to 3,292kg, down from 3,900kg in 2011 — and from 9,194kg in 2003. If the data for 2012 and 2013 are expressed in terms of a notional monthly average, there was actually a slight increase (of just over 2%). What has fallen sharply is the seizure of methamphetamines, from more than 2,000kg in 2012 to only 5kg so far this year.

• El Salvador and the 'Texis cartel'

On 19 August the online news service ElFaro decried the fact that three courts in Santa Ana had successively declared themselves incompetent to try the businessman Jesús Sanabria Zamora and seven other persons charged with trafficking cocaine. Their problem was that they could not agree whether or not this was to be treated under the legislation on organised crime; some of those arrested are suspected members of the ‘Texis cartel’, so called after the organisation’s base in Texistepeque. The matter must now be resolved by the supreme court.

On 12 September the PNC announced that, after an operation across five departments (Santa Ana, Ahuachapán, La Libertad, San Salvador and Cuscatlán) involving 250 police officers and 40 fiscal agents, 32 suspected members of the ‘Texis cartel’ had been apprehended. Marco Tulio Lima, head of DAN (the PNC’s antinarcotics division) said that the investigative work of collecting enough evidence had taken two years; the actual operation took less than 24 hours. Justice minister Ricardo Perdomo said that this had been only the first of what will be many blows against the cartel.

Links

▫ Farah’s paper: http://www.ibiconsultants.net/_pdf/turmoil-and-transition-2.pdf

▫ Zetas in Guatemala: http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/guatemalas-new-narco-map-less-zetas-same-chaos

▫ Seven Myths:

http://www.elperiodico.com.gt/es/20130127/domingo/223901/ http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/MitosHomicidiosGuatemala/Portada?:e

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