Weekly Report - 22 July 2003

DRUG GANGS 'MAKING GUATEMALAN BORDER A NO-GO AREA' 

Businessmen and politicians in the southern state of Chiapas say the authorities are focusing so hard on intercepting the flow of US-bound illegal migrants that they are failing to contain a wave of drug-related violence that threatens to turn the border into a no-go area. Two legislators have called on the federal government to send troops to control the situation. 

The alarm was sounded last week by the local delegate of the Cámara Nacional de Comercio (Conaco), Héctor de la O Santana, after the discovery in Ciudad Hidalgo, next to the Guatemalan border, of two bodies bearing the signs of an execution-type killing had taken the toll since the beginning of the year to 37. 

'If this is allowed to continue,' he said, 'the message we'll be sending abroad is that Chiapas is no-man's land, and what is now happening on the border can contaminate the entire state.' 

The police are closely monitoring the border, but chiefly for illegal migrants -which is undoubtedly a major problem. The local authorities reported last week that they had managed to intercept more than 500 over the previous weekend. 

This is not on the scale of what has been happening along Mexico's northern border (WR-03-20), but the situation in Chiapas has added peculiarities of its own. 

Beyond the migrants. By midweek the death toll in Chiapas had risen to 38. Though some of the killings have been associated with the people-traffickers known as polleros, most of them are attributed to turf wars between rival gangs of drug-traffickers. Chiapas is the entry point on the overland drugs route to the US. 

Blas Zamora and Vitaliano López, congressmen of the opposition Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), note that Chiapas ranks 17th among Mexico's 32 states when it comes to counting 'common' violent crimes, but rises to 13th place when the focus turns to kidnappings and other offences attributed to organised crime. 

The gangs of traffickers operating in several municipalities in Chiapas, they say, are armed with AK-47 assault rifles. 'In the police corporations,' they add, 'we detect indifference and even dissembling -which leads one to suspect that there are acts of corruption.' 

The combination of these two factors is what has led them to ask the federal government to send troops to strengthen security in the border area. There are troops in the field not far away, devoted to patrolling the areas of Chiapas under control of the largely dormant Zapatista rebels. 

Across the border. On the other side of the border, the Guatemalan military are facing demands to deal with another, different set of internal security problems. Two weeks ago the government ordered 400 army troops into the streets of the capital, to strengthen a police force apparently overwhelmed by a wave of criminal and political violence. 

It did not make much of a difference. In the days after the deployment of the military another five people were killed (some close to where the soldiers were patrolling), and the emergency services received more than 80 calls from people injured in violent incidents. 

And that was in the capital. In different parts of the interior another four killings were reported; as in Guatemala city, most are attributed to gang wars -but in one case the victim was a congressional candidate of the opposition Partido de Avanzada Nacional (PAN), Ramiro Garcí­a. 

He was the tenth politician to have been murdered in less than a month. Of the others, six belonged to the Alianza Nueva Nación (ANN), a coalition that includes the former URNG guerrillas, and three to the Unidad Nacional de la Esperanza (UNE).