Guatemala Shooting Raises Concerns About Military’s Expanded Role

Victor Ruiz Caballero for The New York Times

A soldier on patrol in Guatemala City. More Photos »

POPTÚN, Guatemala — The Guatemala military, once one of the most brutal and feared in Central America, is resurging to take on violent crime, forging closer ties with American troops and law enforcement even as worry over human rights abuses and corruption intensifies.

Those concerns deepened in recent weeks with the revelation of ties between former soldiers and drug gangs, and the fatal shooting of several indigenous demonstrators by soldiers on patrol with the police, an event critics of the militarized approach to policing seized on as an example of what can go wrong.

Allegations of corruption and killings by the military have also raised questions about the partnership with the American antidrug program here, just as the United States is reassessing its collaboration with security forces in neighboring Honduras after their role in several deadly episodes there.

"The army should take care of security of the country against attacks from a foreign power and never for citizen security," said Francisco Dall'Anese, the former Costa Rica attorney general who now heads a United Nations commission investigating crime and corruption in Guatemala. He added, "When the military intervenes in conflicts of a civil nature, danger is increased without reaching solutions."

Since the shooting of the demonstrators on Oct. 4 in Totonicapán, 100 miles west of Guatemala City, nine soldiers have been charged with "extrajudicial killing." President Otto Pérez Molina, a former general, said the military would no longer be used to break up protests but stood behind his "mano dura," or iron fist, approach to public safety that relies heavily on the military because the national police have failed to stem the country's rampant violence, some of it fueled by drug trafficking and gangs.

His government is training and deploying more of its famed and feared special forces unit, known as the Kaibiles and for carrying out some of the worst abuses in this country's civil war and ex-members' ties to brutal criminal gangs. The government is also increasing military spending by nearly a quarter and making plans to open new bases near the Mexican border, where drug and organized crime gangs have gained a foothold.

At the same time, it is strengthening ties with the United States military.

From August until last week, a contingent of American Marines operated from a Guatemalan base on the Pacific Coast as part of a 12-nation, American-led antidrug effort called Operation Martillo, or "Hammer," aimed at disrupting the increased flow of South American cocaine along the Central American coastlines. The Marines flew helicopter missions to assist in the tracking of drug planes and boats and conducting training exercises.

With the United States antidrug program in the region an increasingly politically delicate topic, American officials did not allow reporters to observe or interview the American Marines during their two-month deployment in Guatemala, saying arrangements could not be made.

Still, American military officials said the collaboration with local forces is essential. Since January, when Operation Martillo began, the Defense Department said, it has led to the capture of 70 vessels, $15 million worth of marijuana and $2 billion worth of cocaine, though there are signs that the increased enforcement in Central America is pushing drug trafficking back to the Caribbean. American military personnel, working primarily with Guatemalan naval units, share intelligence and surveillance reports but do not carry out arrests or seizures, said Col. Michael W. Minor, the United States Southern Command officer who is the main architect of the mission.

But the deployment of the Guatemala military to fight crime, from patrolling the streets of the capital to mounting raids to capture drug traffickers, has worried human rights groups and lately some diplomats, who question the suitability of soldiers for police work.

They invoke the legacy of the military's history of brutal repression during the 36-year civil war here, which ended in 1996; its long delays in turning in officers responsible for atrocities; and the role former Kaibiles have played in drug trafficking groups.

Former members of the unit helped form and train the Zetas, one of Mexico's most notorious criminal gangs, Mexican and American officials have said. The prime suspect in the massacre of 27 peasants last year attributed to the Zetas — a crime that helped push the government to step up military patrols with the police — was a former Kaibil. Security analysts say the lure of big money from the crime groups could draw in more soldiers.

The Kaibiles were behind the worst atrocity in the civil war, the slaughter of hundreds of people in the indigenous village of Dos Erres in 1982.

Mike McDonald contributed reporting from Guatemala City.

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